Life, in Shades of Purple
by 1Styx and Stones1
Summary: "On the day Tony turns five, he comes to live in a house with a wrap-around porch and a big, leafy rhododendron bush and a soccer goal right in the front yard." AU. Eventual Tiva, McAbby, Jibbs.
1. Chapter 1

**Guys, I don't even KNOW. This thing is a freaking monster, and it just HAPPENED. And it's weird and sad and I kind of love it, despite all the craziness. By the way, this is a two-parter, maybe three if it keeps going like it's BEEN going. Seriously, full thing's like 8000 words and I'm not even done. But, yeah, review and tell me if this is just too weird for me to have published. I kinda love it, just saying.**

**So, anyway, this is most definitely AU. The ages are screwed up a bit, as are the back stories, but things will hopefully become clear. Just keep in mind that I'm taking crazy amounts of allergy medication, and my mind is not entirely my own. Kay. Bye.  
**

**Disclaimer - Actually, I own like everything except the characters this time. So ha!  
**

On the day Tony turns five, he comes to live in a house with a wrap-around porch and a big, leafy rhododendron bush and a soccer goal right in the front yard. The house is a dusky slate color that Tony calls gray and the girl on the front porch swing calls purple, right after she wrinkles her nose at him and declares him 'stupid' in a high-pitched, little-girl voice.

Tony doesn't like purple and he doesn't like the girl from the porch and he does _not_ like being called stupid.

Tony wants to go home.

But the man who says to call him 'Gibbs' or 'boss,' but not 'sir' and not 'Mr. Gibbs' and _definitely_ not 'stupid' (Tony knows because the little girl from the porch blinks and stares at her bare, dirty feet when Gibbs scolds her), says that _this_ is Tony's new home, at least for now, and that purple is a manly color.

Tony calls the man stupid, too, but only after he's left standing alone in his big new room, and in a whisper so that only the smiling animals behind the picture frame can hear him.

Tony doesn't cry, because he's a big boy of _five_. He just throws his bag really hard against the wall and stamps his feet against the powder blue carpet on the floor and says a bad word under his breath, so not even the animals can hear.

The girl from the porch pauses in the hallway to eyeball him pityingly. Tony doesn't like it, because he's probably older and definitely taller than this girl (and he's a boy so he's stronger). She has no right to look at him like he's a baby she needs to feel sorry for.

He says the bad word again, louder, so that the mean girl can hear him. "Damn." He says it right out loud, and nearly frightens himself with his boldness.

"I'm Abby," says the girl finally. She has soft brown hair tied up in pigtails on either side of her head and her toenails are caked in dried dirt and shiny red nail polish. "'M sorry I said you were stupid. If you want you can borrow my second fav'rit teddy to keep you comp'ny."

The teddy is kind of raggedy, and one of the ears is stained with red nail polish, but it smells like bubble soap and Play-Doh and grass and sunscreen when Tony buries his face in it.

"His name is Arch'bald," Abby says solemnly. "And he's bestest friends with _my_ bear Susie Mae. Which means that _we_ have to be bestest friends."

This makes sense, so Tony agrees, and Abby makes him shake hands like they're grown-ups, and then it's official.

They let Arch'bald and Susie Mae have a playdate in the corner while Abby and Tony sit on the top bunk and bravely let their feet dangle through the slats of the railing, Abby's grass-stained, nail-polished feet shaking loose the occasional clod of dirt.

They tell secrets. Abby has a secret hiding place in the woods behind the house, and it can be his hiding place, too, if he promises not to tell _anyone_. She makes him shake her hand again, and it makes Tony feel both very silly and very adult-like. He likes it.

Tony tells Abby that it is his birthday and she claps her hands excitedly and almost falls down the ladder in her hurry to inform Gibbs of this wonderful, exciting, good, great news.

Gibbs smiles, slow and almost hidden, down at them both and asks Tony what his favorite dinner is.

Tony answers bashfully that once he ate choc'lit chip pancakes for dinner when Mommy and Daddy were out for a special adults' night, with all the whipped cream he wanted and baby M&Ms sprinkled on top, and Gibbs does the slow smile again and says he'll see what they can do.

Gibbs and the pretty lady with hair like that girly, consequently stupid, mermaid (the one from the movie that Tony was once forced to sit through while at the Pediatrician's waiting room) are not quite as liberal as Nanny Number Three with whipped cream usage, and there are no M&Ms, baby or otherwise, to be found, but the pancakes are positively _oozing_ with chocolate, and they even stick an orange, partially melted candle into the stack.

Gibbs and the pretty lady and Abby and the one-two-three-four other kids all sing 'Happy Birthday to You' and Gibbs does the slow smile when Tony blows out his candle, and he decides that maybe Gibbs really isn't _so_ stupid after all.

That night he goes to sleep on the bottom bunk (he's too small for the top, even if he IS five, says Jenny the mermaid with legs and a bad singing voice) with the scent of Arch'bald and summer and candle wax in his nose and birthday songs in his ears.

The animals in the picture frame smile through the glow of a cheerful night-light and Tony smiles back, happy.

...

Tony gets a roommate two months and seventeen days after he turns six, right as summer ripens and blossoms, red and rich, into fall.

His name is Timothy McGee, and he has nervous eyes and little-boy hands, and Tony is proudly promoted an upper-bunk occupant and guardian of this newcomer.

"How old are you?"

"F-five," says Tim, and blinks his very wide, frightened eyes. Tony feels very grown up in the presence of such fearful admiration.

"I'm almost five," pipes up Abby, appearing out of nowhere as is her custom. She is wearing no shoes and pigtails with red ribbons and faded jean shorts with dirt _all_ over them. "And Tony's almost _seven_."

Tim cowers in the face of such maturity, but he smiles when Abby offers him her third fav'rit stuffed animal (it's a rabbit with very long, frayed ears and shiny black button eyes and a stain from the time they buried him in their fort in an attempt to trap the Easter Bunny) and even offers to share his pocketful of Jolly Rangers, pink and blue and slightly warped from the heat of their confinement.

Abby heartily crunches at a pale pink candy until Tim says with a shy smile, "It sounds like your teeth are breaking."

And then, oddly, she turns as pink as her candy and swallows very quickly. She accepts another candy when McGee offers it, green apple this time, and sucks it oh-so-delicately until it has withered away into nothing but a citric stain on her lips.

Tim returns Abby's gap-toothed grin (she's lost three teeth to Tony's two, a crushing defeat if he's ever known one) with that same, slightly flushed, look to his face, and Tony feels left out for the first time ever.

He doesn't like it.

...

It isn't until Tony enters the first grade, a proud seven-year-old with a Batman lunchbox and a brand new box of waxy-smelling crayons with all the tips, that he discovers that perhaps things are a bit more difficult than he had anticipated.

He uses his crayons to draw his family, just like the teacher says, but instead of a Mommy and a Daddy and two siblings and a dog, he draws Gibbs and Jenny and Abby and Tim and the five other kids at the house.

And at lunch he sits with a boy named Jack, who has the same lunchbox as Tony, and they talk about superheroes. Jack has a sandwich and an apple and two Oreos wrapped in tinfoil like a present, as well as a napkin with a heart and letters that spell 'I love you. From Mommy.'

The next day Tony wakes up early. He pads down to the kitchen in his bare feet and cotton pajama pants, the ones patterned with cheerful red airplanes, and he digs out a napkin and an inky blue pen.

But he doesn't know what to put. All he has of his mother is a faint blur, the memory of soft fingers and too-sweet breath and the dissonant tinkle of an out-of-tune piano.  
Tony ends up watching the too-bright, gaudy cheer of the shopping channel, curled up beneath a thick blanket in his thin pajamas on the couch until morning breaks and footsteps start creaking overhead.

That day he opens his lunch bag to find, along with a whopping turkey sandwich and this weird, yummy lemon bar thing, a napkin covered in inky blue scrawl.

It reads simply 'Have a good day' - no signature, no hearts - but somehow it's better, even, than the lemon bars. Which is saying something.

...

Susie Mae gets married to a dashing stuffed hippo with severe gastro-intestinal issues, a gift from Gibbs and Jenny for Abby's seventh birthday.

Abby wears a shower curtain, patterned with rubber ducks in shower caps and smiling fish, secured about her figure with various clothespins.

Tim tells her she looks pretty. She blushes.

...

Tony's eleven years old, three weeks away from his twelfth birthday, and pretty much a total big shot when Ziva David comes to the house.

It's late evening and Tony's wielding his brand spanking new lacrosse stick, hurling a bright orange sun into the soccer goal beneath the towering pine trees in the corner of the front yard while attempting to avoid either beaming one of the little 'uns or stepping on Abby and Tim, who are sprawled lazily in the grass, blowing dandelions and talking technology, when the car pulls up alongside the white picket fence.

A sullen-faced girl with a curly ponytail and olive-colored cargo pants slams the car door violently enough to make everyone in the yard flinch. There is a hard look to her face as she marches down the drive and towards the porch. The car, a dark sedan, peels off before she has even reached the wooden steps.

She doesn't spare a glance towards the yard, but had she turned her head she would have seen seven kids - three preteens, four toddlers - all doing a very good impression of deer in the headlights.

The thing is, the white picket fence with its border of rhododendrons is more than just a glorified cliché. It's like a force-field, only prettier, and the gray (okay, purple) Victorian is like a safehouse.

And outside the world goes round, filled with mothers whose hands shake as they pick out lullabies and drop tears on the piano and fathers who stagger home at three in the morning with a blonde on their arm and a new load of cash in their wallet, but inside everything is isolated and safe.

It's like their own little island, and the natives all stare at the foreigner as she knocks on the door with all the force in her tiny, stiffly angry body. There hasn't been a newcomer since McGee, almost four years ago, excepting the toddlers since they were mere babies upon arrival.

There's an ice cream truck tinkling in the distance, its tinny anthem punctuated by the increasingly violent raps to the front door. There's no answer - Gibbs and Jenny ran down the street to negotiate window repairs with the notoriously cranky Mr. Fornell, whose car received a mysterious hit from a certain orange lacrosse ball, and Tony has been left to man the troops until their return.

After all, he's the oldest.

Finally, his palms sweaty around the cool metal of his lacrosse stick, Tony forces himself to move towards the girl, carefully stepping over Abby and McGee's hands (which interlocked in a moment of fear around the time the car's tires screeched away) and scuffing at a white fluff of dandelion as he goes.

"Can I help you?"

The girl slams once more on the door, flat-handed and angry, and does not turn around as she answers, "Not unless you are Mr. Gibbs."

"He's not here right now."

She sighs and turns to face him with dark, defiant eyes that dare him to mock the faint streaks of tears that mar her tan skin. "When will he be back?"

Tony shrugs. "Um. Soonish? Can I, like, take a message or . . . ?" he trails off, feeling foolish.

The girl shakes her head impatiently. "I will wait." Her eyes flit about awkwardly for a second, and then she takes an uncertain seat on the white porch swing, crossing her ankles and fixing her eyes on her knitted fingers.

Tony sucks in his lips and leans against the porch railing, absent-mindedly fingering his lacrosse stick with slightly anxious digits. "So are you, like, coming to stay here?" he questions, feeling six pairs of nervous eyes drilling holes into the back of his head.

The girl shrugs and kicks angrily at a crumpled leaf, the movement setting the swing rocking. "I do not know."

"Oh . . . "

The ice cream truck is louder now, only a few streets over. Tony fixes his mind on it, wondering why on earth the truck is blaring 'Jingle Bells' in the middle of July.

The sun melts away behind the peaks of the fir trees, leaving the sky a dusky color like that of the house, and still Gibbs and Jenny have not returned.

"Um, Tony," says Abby in an uncharacteristically timid voice, appearing beside him and shifting anxiously from one bare foot to the other, "it's seven-thirty, and Michelle looks like she's gonna fall asleep, so . . . "

"Um. Right." Tony turns to survey the bunch of little kids who have managed to tackle and pin Tim to the ground, feeling both very mature and very stupid. "Yo! Time for bed! Everyone inside! Brush your teeth and . . . pee. And . . . Yeah. Now."

The kids go with very little protest, casting quick, fearful glances their way as they file past Tony and the stranger and into the house. Abby and Tim follow, the latter lingering hesitantly at the door. "Uh, Tony, they're gonna need help . . . I don't think Jimmy knows how to brush his teeth without swallowing the toothpaste yet . . . "

"Be there in a second," Tony assures him, and turns back to the girl. "I, um, need to go help with bedtime. Do you- D'you want to come wait inside?" he asks, hoping desperately that she will say no. He doesn't want some stranger with angry eyes penetrating the inner realms of their sanctuary. The porch is one thing, but . . .

"I will wait out here," she says decisively, prodding the floor with the toe of her sneaker to keep the swing's gentle momentum. "Thank you."

He retreats as fast as he possibly can without flat-out running, wishing he could slam the door and lock it behind him. Instead he just closes the screen door, letting the sounds of the unseasonable ice cream man's ditty and the creak of the front porch swing waft in with the summer breeze.

Gibbs comes home fifteen minutes later, grumbling and calling Fornell rude names until Jenny thwacks him on the back of the head in admonition. They tuck in the little guys and set Abby, Tim, and Tony up with a TV show, and then they usher Ziva David into Gibbs' office.

Over the sounds of the _SpongeBob_ theme song, Tony hears the rhythm of Gibbs' irate pacing and muffled, angry sobs.

...

It's the only time he hears (or sees) Ziva David cry.

Even when Abby skirts around her with distrustful eyes and flat-out snaps at her to _go away_ when the Israeli girl stumbles upon their secret clubhouse in the hydrangea bramble behind the house, she doesn't cry.

She doesn't cry when she loses to him at Monopoly Junior or when she falls down the stairs and bites her lip so hard it bleeds.

She doesn't cry when she steps in a pothole and sprains her ankle while playing soccer with Tony in the middle of the street, barefoot.

She doesn't cry when she slices her fingertip open while 'cutting a bagel,' though Tony thinks she might just have been fooling around with the knife for fun.

She doesn't cry when Tony 'accidently' pushes her off the footbridge and into the creek they discover, way back behind the house, while exploring. She just laughs and grabs his ankles and pulls him in, too.

She doesn't even cry on movie night when Bambi's mother dies, even though Abby and McGee are sniffling into their respective fists and Jenny is bawling into Gibbs' shoulder. (Tony mists up a little too, but only because he got popcorn grease in his eyes, not because he's thinking about his _own_ mom or anything.)

Basically, by the time summer comes to a close Tony has established:  
a) that Ziva David is incredibly reckless, and b) that Ziva David is really pretty cool.

(They both cry at the end of _Titanic_, but nobody knows about that, because they sniffled very quietly from their hiding place in the shadows behind the couch, so as not to hurt their dignity or alert the sobbing Jenny and the wryly amused Gibbs to their presence.)

...

Abby warms up to Ziva after a while, and soon they're like the Four Musketeers in their bright, prickly fort with the sunshiny petals that turn your skin to yellow if you rub them between your fingers.

It's kind of the perfect summer. They explore and they sneak into each other's rooms at night to whisper and giggle and Gibbs once even lets the four of them walk all the way to town together - _by themselves_ - to buy ice cream.

Of course, Ziva insists that Gibbs was discreetly tailing them in his car the entire time, but Tony prefers to relish in their alleged independence.

And then fall comes.

Tony is sitting at the dining room table, begging Ziva to just give him a summary of the first three chapters of 'The Giver,' because seventh grade is freaking _hard_, and this book makes _no sense_, when the doorbell rings.

Tony ignores it, just continues pelting an annoyingly unperturbed Ziva with pretzel nuggets, and lets Abby scamper down the stairs to answer the door, as she takes an eager, nosy delight in doing.

The ten-year-old - who has taken to garbing herself entirely in black, much to Jenny's concern and Gibbs' amusement - swings the door open wide, and then stops in her tracks. From his perch on the table, Tony sees her stiffen.

"Um. Hi."

And then _that voice_ drawls, "I'm looking for a Mr. Gibbs."

"Um, okay," Abby says in a small voice, stepping back to allow _him_ entrance. "He's right upstairs. I'll go get him. Wait- wait here, please."

It's him. He's thinner and clean-shaven and he's not swaying on his feet, but Tony knows it's him. He slides off the table silently, goes to stand at the threshold where the dining room meets the foyer, and tries not to breathe as the familiar green eyes rove the room, finally coming to a rest on the slim, brown-haired boy.

Anthony DiNozzo, Senior, grins. "Junior! Long time no see!"

...

"He's your guardian," says Gibbs flatly, eyes on the pan of fragrant bacon sizzling before him on the stove.

"He's never even home!" Tony bangs a fist against the fridge, knocking loose a couple of magnets. "What kind of guardian is that?"

"Maybe he's cleaned up his act," McGee suggests quietly from where he is placing silverware on the long, oak table.

Abby shushes him immediately, putting her hands on her hips and glaring. He shrugs, offers Tony an apologetic smile, and continues with his work.

"Tim's right," Gibbs says over the violent hiss of bacon.

Abby turns on McGee, pigtails whirling indignantly. "You see! Look what you did!"

"I was just saying!" McGee protests, and it is a testament to how much he has matured that he does not falter under Abby's accusations. "We don't _know_ that he hasn't changed."

"We don't know that he _has_," Tony counters, flopping down sullenly in his seat and watching Gibbs deftly transfer the bacon to a plate.

"Actually," says Ziva crisply, entering the room carrying several pieces of paper. "We do. In order to regain custody, he had to fix up his home and clean up his act. He was inspected by a social worker."

"Oh."

Ziva shoots him a small, sympathetic quirk of lips and slides into her seat. "Maybe he really has cleaned up his act."

Abby stands up abruptly, her chair screeching against the tile and banging into the wall. "It's like you guys _want_ him to leave!" she wails, her first sobs echoing as she runs from the room.

She locks herself in her room. They eat dinner in sulky silence.

...

"Just until the end of the school year," begs Tony, tears silently falling onto the pillow he is clutching with stiff fingers in his lap. The phone is cradled between his cheek and his shoulder, and the position is beginning to make his neck ache. "Dad, you can't uproot me in the middle of the year!"

After a moment, Senior sighs. "I guess I do need a little time to finish cleaning up my act," he says begrudgingly. "I'll work something out with Mr. Gibbs, okay, Junior?"

Tony manages to shoot Ziva, who is sitting Indian-style on the powder blue rug below and watching him with careful, guarded eyes, a bleary grin and two thumb's up. She radiates back her own smile, a rare burst of pure emotion on her stony face, and he basks in its glow.

"Yeah, Dad. Thanks," he says, his voice tremoring with the sincerity of his gratitude. "Thank you, thank you, _thank you_."

"Don't forget who your real family is," says Senior sharply. "Now let me talk to Gibbs."

Tony signals to Ziva that he'll be right back and tears down the hallway to Gibbs' and Jenny's room. He throws the phone to Gibbs, beams at Jenny, and hurtles back to his room.

Ziva must have informed Abby and McGee of the news, because all three of them pile on top of him in a laughing, triumphant heap and topple him to the rug.

"It's only until the summer," Tony says finally, stretching out onto his back and grinning at the smiling animals in the old picture on the wall.

"That's _months_ away," Abby says happily, reaching out and taking his hand and squeezing.

That night they sneak down to the living room and watch old vampire movies on TV, biting their knuckles to stifle their screams and sneaking spoonfuls of ice cream from the freezer.

Afterwards they are all too sleepy and stiff with fear to even contemplate returning to their darkened rooms, so they cuddle together on the couch and drift off. Ziva falls asleep with her head on Tony's shoulder, his head resting on hers.

The next morning they wake early, in order to avoid detection by sneaking back to bed, to find that someone has switched off the television and draped their huddle of tangled limbs in a thick blanket.

The house is quiet and dim. They make chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast (or, rather, Tim makes pancakes while Tony and Abby criticize his flipping technique and Ziva pretends she is not sneaking handfuls of semi-sweet chips from the bag when no one's looking) and no one burns the house down.

Pretty much, it's an amazing night, because they're young and they're friends and summer is months and months away.

...

They have snowball fights and drink hot chocolate and load in the presents at Christmas, and they try not to count down the days until school ends.

For once it's dread and not eager anticipation that swells and the numbers dwindle.

...

Tony turns thirteen five days before school ends.

They make chocolate chip pancakes and sing to him, but that night he lays awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to McGee's quiet snores as his stomach churns.

He's so wrapped up in his worries that he doesn't even hear the door open, doesn't notice the crack of light that slides across the ceiling, until Ziva has already gracefully and silently ascended the ladder.

"Hi."

"I did not get you a birthday present," she says guiltily, settling down opposite him on the bed and sliding her icy cold feet beneath the comforter.

He shrugs. "That's okay."

"I could not think of anything that you'd want," she continues, "that I could give you."

Tony looks at her, his best friend, with her dark halo of curls tussled and her eyes troubled, and decides to be honest. "All I want is to stay."

"I know," she sighs, pulling up her knees and tugging down her t-shirt to cover her thin, sun-browned limbs like canvas over the frame of a circus tent. In the dark, he can just make out the bright red lettering of the advertisement for some bagel shop emblazoned on the front. "That is all I want, too. But that is not something I can give you, yes?"

Tony just shrugs. It's not logical, he knows, but it's what he wants. More than anything.

"I wish I could run away," he voices a few moments later, fixing his eyes on the blurred light of the lamp-post through the window. "You and me, we could run away and- and live in the woods or something. Like in that movie."

Ziva makes a noise, quirking her mouth into a half-smile, that might have been a laugh had it had time to ripen. She doesn't answer.

But in Tony's mind, the idea is blooming. He's only thirteen, after all - just a kid - and he's desperate and feeling brave in the darkness. "We could do it," he says slowly, but with much more energy. "Ziva, we could. Out the window, and we could follow the creek. Gibbs says it leads to some lake in the national park-"

"I thought," says Ziva finally, "that you wanted to stay here."

"I do. But, I mean, if I can't stay here . . . I _can't _go back to my Dad, I _can't_."

But she doesn't understand. Or maybe she does, better than even he, because she simply stretches her legs and scoots to sit beside him, propped up against the headboard.

She's only twelve, he's barely thirteen, and they're best friends forever; they fall asleep sitting up, holding hands, and wishing their solution was as simple as running away.

But there really isn't a solution at all.

...

Ziva David does not cry when she hugs Tony goodbye. Her unpainted fingernails dig into his back through the fabric of his shirt and she exhales with only a hint of a shudder, clinging to him fiercely for a second or so before releasing him.

He doesn't cry either. He did when Abby and Ziva crept into his and Tim's room (only Tim's now, he supposes) the night before, when they all huddled in a circle in the shadowed recesses of the lower bunk and held hands and promised never ever ever to let go.

He has Arch'bald bundled safely between two fleecy sweatshirts in the bottom of his bag, McGee's phone number scrawled in permanent marker across his palm, and the raised welts of Ziva's clenched fingernails marking his knuckles.

Abby attacks him next, with a flying hug and a choked sob, dirty blonde pigtails drooping sadly. "You're my bestest friend," she tells him, her sharp chin digging into his shoulder, her entire body trembling in his arms, "forever."

He blinks hard, and squeezes her harder, but he doesn't cry. His dad is watching. He _can't_.

He and McGee get caught awkwardly between a hug and a handshake, and eventually manage to hug each other at an arm's length. "Take care of the top bunk," Tony says in stony mock-seriousness. The younger boy cracks a smile.

Jenny hugs him. The little kids cling to his legs, crying because everyone else is, not really understanding. Gibbs shakes his hand and squeezes his shoulder and tells him to call if he ever needs _anything_.

They follow him out to the porch, waving and crying and trying to smile _because he's going to a better place_. (They said the same thing about his mom, when she died. He tries not to think about it.)

Ziva isn't on the porch. He waves until his arm muscles burn and they all fade away, and the last thing he sees is Abby tearfully waving one of Susie Mae's battered paws in the air.

His father smiles, pats his shoulder, and turns on some boring radio talk show about the stock market.

**So, reviews will motivate me to finish this gargantuan baby... Do you like it so far? I think I should be able to wind it up in a second chapter, a good chunk of which is already written. Three chapters at the most, I promise. I've got finals coming up and stuff - the last thing I need is another multi-chapter fic on my plate. **

**So tell me who your favorite character is, what you liked, what you didn't. Favorite lines/sections? Comments, complains, everything. Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed! :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hey, folks. I know this is a random day to update on, but I've got to get this monster down before I lose my inspiration and leave y'all hanging. Thank you to everybody who reviewed my last chapter - I haven't gotten around to replying individually yet, but I just want to say how inspiring it was to find out that people decided to read this, even though they dislike AU, simply because they have faith in me. Like, literally, it was so incredibly flattering. So thank you, thank you, thank you to every single one of you. **

**Aaaand, as I had suspected, this will definitely be stretching on for at least one more chapter, because my muse refuses to cooperate. Seriously, this took a totally crazy turn and now I definitely need at least another chapter to wind it up. This one doesn't end on a terribly happy note, but I've got another 2000 words already, and still going strong. Just remember that happy endings are kinda my thing, and fear not. I might even be able to get chapter 3 (hopefully the last chapter) up by Friday!  
**

**Disclaimer - Ha. FUNNYPANTS.  
**

It's not until he leaves that Tony realizes how truly happy and how truly screwed up things were behind the picket fence and the flowering bushes.

He eats dinner at a huge dining room table made out of dark wood so shiny that it reflects his face back at him - his sole companion.

Dad steps in briefly to pat his shoulder and tell him to shout if he needs anything - he'll be in his office. Tony nods and shovels more mac n' cheese into his mouth, exchanging sullen glances with his reflection in the wood.

He misses the squabbling of little kids, Abby turning up her nose at any and all meat products, McGee methodically cutting his steak into perfect little squares, Ziva punching him when he tries to steal her dessert.

He misses Gibbs and Jenny exchanging wry glances across the table. He misses bedtime and routine and bickering and no freaking personal space, he misses it so bad that it hurts, and all he wants to do is go _home_.

It's like he's five years old all over again, except this time his room is dim and blank and there is no little green-eyed girl to offer him bears and secrets. He eats reheated KFC off an absurdly expensive china plate instead of chocolate chip pancakes.

He misses hearing McGee's quiet breathing and gentle, slurred murmuring from the bunk below him. Sometimes he used to lay awake and try to make out what the younger boy was saying, but the words were always just fragments of techno-babble.

He misses hearing the quiet creak of small feet pacing the flowered rug in the next room over, as Abby's mind whirled in even faster circles, never slowing to allow for sleep.

He misses jolting awake in the middle of the night to the sound of desperate, panicked whimpers that eventually crescendo into a short, piercing shriek of someone coming into consciousness.

* * *

McGee has a cell phone, and sometimes they text, but it's not the same. Summer ripens into fall without a visit, then withers into winter.

They exchange Christmas cards - a cheery photograph of half a dozen smiling kids flanked by two adults with kind eyes and laugh lines swapped for a generic holiday greeting on expensive stock paper, with a business card clipped to the back.

Tony gets a new phone and a laptop for Christmas. The tree's fake, decorated by the housekeeper with plastic baubles, and his dad simply hands him the expensive gifts unceremoniously.

He doesn't even feign gratitude. Dad doesn't even feign concern.

* * *

For his fourteenth birthday his Dad takes him to a Red Sox game. It's really kind of incredible, and their seats are right up in the front in the party box, and he buys Tony a thing of cotton candy that is roughly the size of his head.

Tony grins right up until the moment that the bored-looking man in a business suit and the pretty girl with a dancer's body stride into the box.

His Dad stands up with a charming grin. "René! Welcome! And this beautiful young woman must be your daughter!"

The man smiles back, shakes the offered hand, and guides the pretty girl into a seat with a domineering hand on the small of her back. She sits down, crosses her legs primly, and promptly begins to shiver in the unseasonably cool, muggy night air. "DiNozzo. Good to finally meet you in person. This is my daughter, Jeanne. I presume this is your son?" he says in a definite French accent.

Tony smiles duly and offers a hand upon his father's prompting glare, his excitement dissipating as rapidly as the sugary, insubstantial floss of cotton candy on his tongue.

Senior and René Benoit, with his French accent and hard eyes, talk business all through the first inning. Jeanne's perfect white teeth chatter audibly, beating a two-part rhythm in time with the click of her cell phone keys. Tony wants to cry.

Someone socks the ball into the outfield, the Yankees right-fielder makes a spectacular snatch. The roar of the crowd does not phase the adults, but it startles Jeanne Benoit into letting her cell phone slip from her busy fingertips.

Tony stoops and hands it to her, smiling sympathetically. She blushes and murmurs her thanks, eyes shy behind her lashes.

"They just robbed him of a run," Tony finds himself explaining, because he knows what it's like to be lonely and because Jeanne is really very pretty. "That's the third out, so now the Yankees are up at bat. They're, like, the Sox's biggest rivals, so if we're lucky some diehard fans will get drunk enough to start a brawl."

Jeanne laughs. Tony smiles, heartened, and continues:

"No, seriously. It could make the news!"

Jeanne pulls an ironic face, leaning towards him conspiratorially, and laments, "Daddy told me we were going to see a ballet. I should've known better than to believe him, but . . . " She shrugs, sighs, and goes back to her phone.

"I know the feeling," says Tony after a minute, watching Jeanne's long fingers fly across the keyboard. "I thought we were actually going to, like, bond or watch baseball or something. It's my birthday," he admits.

Jeanne looks up, closes her phone decisively, and pockets it like maybe she actually cares. "How old?"

"Fourteen."

She nods. "I'll be fourteen next week. All I've been asking for is tickets to see Swan Lake. I think this is supposed to be my birthday present, though."

"Surprise!" He says sarcastically, wiggling his finger dramatically. Jeanne giggles again, like she actually thinks he's funny or something, but her face is kind of limp and sad, like a deflated balloon, and Tony feels the need to channel his inner Abby.

He gets to his feet and grabs Jeanne, pulling her up after him. "C'mon. I've got an idea," he says, and yanks her after him, ignoring their respective fathers' questioning looks.

They bribe some poster board and a Sharpie off a well-equipped fan a few rows back, and Jeanne utilizes her considerable artistic talent to letter in big, chunky font the slogan 'It's Our Birthday!'

(The exclamation points are a bit girly for Tony's taste, but he doesn't say anything because the girl's so excited and she kind of reminds him of Ziva, the way laughter takes her composed face by surprise, like a flash of brilliant lightning.)

It's all pretty awesome, because they're on the Jumbo Screen and Jeanne's laughing and Tony remembers what it's like to have _friends_ again, until Senior pulls him aside during seventh inning stretch to clap him on the shoulder and applaud his initiative.

Tony blinks. "Initiative?"

Senior grins. "Didn't even need to tell you, you just took it upon yourself to befriend the Benoit girl! That's my boy!"

He likes that his dad's proud of him, but he's not quite sure what he's done to earn this newfound pride. "Um. Sure. She's really nice. Why-"

Senior chortles. "Laying on the charm, just like his dad . . . Get her number, okay, Junior? Invite her over for dinner. Hell, take her out for dinner! But don't let her leave this stadium without the promise of a rendezvous."

And then he gets it. "You . . . want me to use her? So you can cut a deal with her dad?"

His dad just shrugs. "You'd be getting yourself a fine bit o' leg in the process, Junior. You could do a lot worse."

He wants to yell at his dad, tell the jerk that he's not going to cooperate, but they're in the middle of a crowded stadium and his dad's hand is still resting on his shoulder, so instead he just grins and walks away. Jeanne's phone number is already scrawled across his palm in Sharpie - loopy letters and a smiley face after the last digit. He doesn't mention that part.

* * *

Ziva texts him that night for the first time since he saved her number into his phone.

_From: Ziva_

_Happy birthday. I saw you on TV today. _

/

**To: Ziva**

**Yeah, we went to a game for my b-day... How'd I look? ;)**

/

_From: Ziva_

_Your head was mostly hidden behind your obnoxiously large sign. I feel bad for anyone who was sitting behind you._

/

**To: Ziva**

**Huh. Yeah. We didn't think about that...**

/

_From: Ziva_

_'We'?_

/

**To: Ziva**

**Me and this girl, Jeanne. Her dad and mine were talking business. Her birthday's next week.**

/

_From: Ziva_

_Oh. That's who she was._

/

**To: Ziva**

**Yeah. **

/

She doesn't text back. He's kind of glad. As he wonders when things became so stunted and lifeless between him and his supposed best friend, his phone vibrates again.

_From: Jeanne _

_Hey! _

/

He thinks briefly of his father, then dismisses the thought. He can be friends with anyone he wants, regardless of whether or not his father approves.

**To: Jeanne**

**Hey! Didja hear? We were on TV! **

* * *

Tony knows his father is working a deal simply because their family dinner schedule goes from one, maybe two, nights a week to none at all.

He knows it's got to do with René Benoit because the Frenchman has come for dinner several times now, his pretty daughter in tow.

The adults lock themselves in the office with glasses of wine in hand and their game faces at the ready, talking in hushed voices that Tony can just make out over the music.

Jeanne plays piano, and she tries to teach him, positioning his fingers on the yellowing ivories of his mother's old piano with her own browned digits. He kind of stinks, though, so mostly he just sits next to her and watches her sway gently as her fingers with the nail polish colored like ballet slippers dance along the keys.

He's lonely and she's lonely, and her laughter reminds him of Ziva, and she's like Abby in that she's so eager to please, and it makes things easier.

He doesn't like her _like that_, no matter what his dad insinuates, even though sometimes he thinks that Jeanne might like him . . . _like that_. Sometimes she looks at him out of the corner of her eyes as she plays love songs on the piano, and when he grins at her while they're laughing over something, she flushes pinker than her nails.

And that's why it is all really so very, simply easy.

* * *

"René Benoit?" Ziva repeats carefully into the phone, "B-e-n-o-i-t?"

"Yeah. Benoit," Tony repeats, leaning back against the wall and wondering what the heck this is about. He's got a basketball game in half an hour, and he really doesn't have time to stop and chat just because Ziva has finally decided to stop giving him the silent treatment. "Hey, Ziva, how come you stopped answering my texts?"

She ignores him, just takes in a sharp breath. There's a thump and a squeal of excitement that Tony thinks belongs to Abby, and then Ziva says in slow triumph. "That is it. We got him."

"Um. What?"

"René Benoit," recites Ziva in a slight-song, as if reading something aloud, "also known as 'La Grenouille,' is under FBI surveillance due to past business transactions in which La Grenouille is believed to have sold armaments to various terrorist groups, etc., etc. . . "

"Wait, you mean my dad-"

"We do not know for _certain_," Ziva concedes. Her breathing is elevated, and Tony can almost picture the self-satisfied smirk on her face, although he is not quite sure what her face looks like anymore. And that knowledge alone is enough to dispel what little qualms he had harbored.

"But if he _is_ up to anything shady, all we need to do is prove it, and then I can come home, right?"

"Yes."

Tony glances down at his phone, which is declaring that he has one new message from Jeanne, and sets his jaw. "Okay," he says, "I think I've got a plan."

* * *

He kisses Jeanne a week and a half later while their fingers are tangling on the piano. It's not his first kiss - he briefly kissed Abby during a game of Spin the Bottle a couple years ago, and he's kissed several girls from his snobby middle school over the length of the year - but Jeanne shyly mentions later that he's her first kiss, and it makes him want to vomit.

His dad winks at him knowingly, nods his approval like he actually thinks Tony's doing this for _him_, but Tony can't even really be disgusted with his father when he's just as bad, if not worse. He's playing Jeanne, just like his Dad wanted him to, for his own selfish agenda.

"It is not like that," Ziva disagrees later that night, when he calls for the reassurance of her words and her quiet breathing over the line as she listens in turn. "You are merely utilizing the advantages of your friendship with her in order to stop a criminal and return home. It is not hurting her. And you do not even have to break up with her once you come home, if you do not wish to. She will never have to know."

"I guess." He sighs, and leans back against his bedroom wall, listening to the faint hiss of Ziva's breathing. "Have you ever kissed anybody?" he asks abruptly, remembering the taste of sticky vanilla bean lip-gloss.

"Why?"

Tony shrugs, even though she can't see him. "I don't know. I was just wondering. Have you?"

Ziva sighs. "Yes," she admits.

It's weird to think about, because the Ziva in Tony's mind is only twelve, the exact same height as him, and still missing two of her adult teeth. He's not sure he likes the idea of her going around kissing someone. "Who?"

"Who was what?" she enquires. "My first kiss? Or my most recent?"

Tony blinks. "You've had more than one?"

Ziva laughs. "Contrary to what you may believe, Tony, some people find me relatively attractive," she retorts smugly.

"I don't even know what you look like anymore," he admits quietly, fingering the hem of his t-shirt.

There's a moment of silence. "I will send you a picture of me if you send one of you," she offers almost shyly.

Tony's already pulled out his cell phone, flipping through his camera gallery to select a photo Jeanne took of him at the baseball game where they met. "Deal."

His phone buzzes and declares that he has a new multimedia message almost immediately afterwards. He waits for the file to download, then studies the picture with eager eyes, Ziva's breath quiet in his ear.

It's a random photo of her sitting on the front porch swing that Tony remembers so well, laughing at whoever it was that took the picture. She's simultaneously familiar and different, with her tan skin and dark eyes. Her face is sharper now, her cheekbones more defined, and her hair is curling around her shoulders as opposed to the sloppy ponytail he had grown accustomed to.

"You're kind of hot," he says frankly after a minute, saving the attachment to his phone and setting it as her contact picture.

"I know," Ziva says smugly, laughing. "You are not so bad yourself."

"You look . . . older," he pronounces. "Different. Not bad. Good, actually. But different."

"You need to cut your hair before you start looking like Justin Bieber," is the response.

He grins ruefully and runs a hand through his hair. "Jeanne says she likes it long."

There's a brief pause, and then Ziva says, very simply, "Oh."

He persuades his dad into taking him to the barber's the next day to get his hair cut. He takes a new picture and sends it to Ziva as soon as he gets home.

_From: Ziva_

_Much better :)_

* * *

School starts up again. There's a pretty seventh grader on Tony's bus who stares at him with vaguely coquettish eyes.

He tells her he has a girlfriend.

She turns around in her seat to face front.

* * *

_From: McGeek_

_Gibbs found the magazines you left under the mattress. DiNozzo, he thinks they're MINE! _

/

**To: McGeek**

**McPlayboy. McBooty-licious. McPlayah. :)**

/

_From: McGeek_

_I hate you. _

...

**To: Ziva**

**So this is like Phase One or whatever - I'm going to Jeanne's tonight for out first dinner as an official 'couple.'**

/

_From: Ziva_

_Tell me you are not wearing jeans_...

/

**To: Ziva**

**Well. Yeah. But they're nice jeans. Anyway, what exactly am I looking for?**

/

_From: Ziva_

_Just make a mental map of where he keeps his laptop, where his office is. McGee says to find out what kind of security system they have if you can. Abby says hi._

/

**To: Ziva**

**Got it. Wish me luck... **

* * *

Jeanne's wearing a dress. It's ballet slipper pink, with eyelet lace tipping the hem and the capped sleeves. It makes her hair shine a glossy nut brown.

Tony feels decidedly under-dressed in his jeans and polo, especially standing next to Jeanne in the glossy marble foyer of her massive house, under the scrutinizing gaze of René Benoit.

Finally, the Frenchman's face creases into a smile, and Jeanne squeezes his hand with a slight smile. Tony doesn't let her pull away, instead allowing her to lead him further into the house, smiling and chatting happily about how she just _knew_ Daddy would love him.

They eat fancy French food (Tony has a sinking suspicion that he may have just eaten his first snail) and then Jeanne pulls him up the stairs to her room. It's pink and white, with framed, signed photos of various ballerinas and countless ticket stubs arranged on the walls.

"Daddy has to go out for a while," Jeanne tells him, with a proudly mischievous smirk on her face that's just too adorable. Tony kisses her.

They make out on the white leather couch in the corner with the designer labels that make Tony's eyes bug. He tells himself that it's really not _so_ bad, because Jeanne's a fairly good kisser and she's pretty when her face is flushed and her hair is tousled, but in truth it's really not bad _at all_.

Except for the snails. _They _were bad.

He takes pictures of her, smiling crookedly in her pink dress, in the white marble foyer. Later, he uses the tools on his phone to crop the picture and zoom in on his actual target - the security system control pad on the wall next to the door.

He sends it to McGee (because for some reason he doesn't feel like talking to Ziva right now), but he also prints a copy of the original photo and tacks it up on the wall, next to his picture of Ziva and last year's Christmas card.

* * *

Tony almost kills Ziva when she vaults gracefully into his window that night. He literally has his heavy metal desk lamp in hand before he recognizes the features of the girl from a photo he has committed to memory, and stands down.

"Holy- I mean, _Dude. Ziva._ What the hell?" he pants incoherently, returning the lamp to the night table and sinking, knees weak, back onto the bed.

"Hi," says Ziva, her teeth white in the darkness as she grins the same smile he remembers, the one that would light her face right before she did something totally crazy.

"Hi," he says finally. He smiles back, because how can he not, when she's so peculiarly beautiful, silhouetted against the faintly moonlit window. "So are you, like, embracing your inner Edward Cullen or something?"

She pulls a face, still lingering hesitantly at the edge of the room. "Tell me you did not read those books."

He snorts. "No, but Jeanne made me watch it with her. She thinks the werewolf dude's attractive or something."

He can see Ziva roll her eyes, her smile losing a bit of its luster, and quickly skirts past the whole 'Jeanne' topic.

"So. Are you Jacob or Edward? And what happened to my window screen?"

She smiles again, and comes to perch on his wooden footboard, swinging her legs over to rest on the bed. "Neither. I am a criminal here to burgle your house," she tells him very seriously.

He smiles, tries to pretend he's not tracing the graceful lines of her jean-clad legs with his sleep-crusted eyes. "And my window screen?"

Ziva shrugs her shoulders casually. "I cut the screen and forced the lock."

"With, like, a knife?"

"No. I gnawed it into shreds with my teeth," she returns snidely, baring white incisors playfully.

"That's really gross," Tony informs her.

She laughs. "Anyway, I cannot stay. I bribed a friend into stopping here for a moment, but she will get impatient. I just came to tell you that McGee is fairly certain he can disable the security system and to make sure I would be able to get in through your window."

Tony blinks. "So, is this gonna be like a regular thing?"

Ziva rolls her eyes again, standing. "Of course not. But in case of emergency-"

"Because," he continues, cutting her off, "I could probably just give you a key."

She smirks. "It is more fun this way. See you."

She strides to the window, swinging her legs over the sill and edging out onto a sturdy oak limb a couple inches away, then turns back to flash him one more brilliant grin before dropping out of view.

* * *

Three days later she's back, but this time she's got a Ziploc baggie of Abby's chocolate cookies with her, and she stays for almost two hours.

He starts to remembers why she so instantly became his best friend as they banter, but there's a tiny part of him that refuses to remember that Ziva is just that - his best friend. That's the part of him that tingles, like a foot that's fallen asleep, every time the Israeli girl's grin lights up the darkness.

After she's clambered nimbly down the tree and darted off, with a long walk in store that Tony does not envy her, he himself goes on a trip.

Maybe it's the chocolate or Ziva's intoxicating presence or the exhilarated bravery that comes only in the dark, but he finally steels up the nerve to penetrate the lion's den.

As his alarm clock blinks away the early minutes of a new day, Tony slips down into his father's darkened office and sets to work.

The next night, he gives Ziva the external hard drive thingy that McGee insisted would be most efficient in conveying information. She, in turn, gives him the promise of a sleepless night in the form of the brief grip of her hand on his.

His phone is flashing with three new messages from Jeanne, but he can't bring himself to read them.

* * *

His dad comes home staggeringly drunk sometime after midnight, calling loudly for his wife, his Cecilia.

Tony sits at the top of the stairs and watches through the railing slats as his father stands in the foyer expectantly, waiting for the sound of brisk, light footsteps that no longer come.

Eventually the drunken man staggers out of view, but still Tony sits in a dull, ghosted kind of agony, until a hand slips into his and a soft-eyed Ziva guides him back to his room. They sink to the floor, with their backs against the frame of his bed, and stare at the crack of light glowing beneath the closed door

"Life sucks," he says after a while, putting his head on her absurdly bony, yet oddly comfortable shoulder and allowing her to tentatively smooth his hair with the hand that he is not gripping.

She doesn't answer, just sits and strokes and breathes, but she doesn't leave until morning, kissing him on the cheek as she goes.

Life sucks a little less.

* * *

They don't talk about that night.

There are a lot of things they don't talk about, really.

They don't talk about the photo of Jeanne on the wall, which has been joined by a strip of blurry snapshots from a photo booth and a lopsided, out-of-focus picture of them kissing that Jeanne snapped with one hand and her eyes closed.

They don't talk about the times that Ziva doesn't come even after promising to be there.

They don't talk about his dad or her parents or the scars that dapple her skin.

Instead they talk about their lives and about home, the real one, where Abby has dyed her hair and Tim likes it far too much for their relationship to be purely platonic, where Jenny and Gibbs bicker at night about finances, where Ziva does crazy feats of agility and then brushes them off with a shrug, where every inch of Tony's being _needs_ to be.

"Do you ever think about it still? About running?"

Ziva gets up and says she needs to go.

They don't talk about that either.

* * *

Jeanne invites him to her ballet recital as spring begins its drizzly reign. Her eyes are too anxiously hopeful for Tony to do anything other than kiss her lips and say yes, of course, he can't wait.

She's a truly fantastic dancer, and her face lights up when he tells her so.

They go out to dinner at some crazy expensive steak house afterwards, and Tony ducks into the bathroom long enough to text Ziva, informing her that he won't be able to hang out tonight.

He feels bad, but he knows he would feel worse each and every time Jeanne smiled at him if he'd simply sat there, with the promise of several darkened, laughing hours to come with another girl, albeit his best friend, on his mind.

He slings his jacket over the chair beside his father innocently enough. Buried beneath several Kleenex in an inside pocket is his phone, set on voice recorder. It helps him justify the fact that he spends the entire night holding hands with Jeanne under the table.

* * *

Ziva's suspicious.

She only stays for twenty minutes the next night before vaulting back out the window, a copy of the previous night's recording in hand.

He ends up texting Jeanne until the wee hours of morning instead.

He pretends that he doesn't find it irritating when Jeanne responds to nearly everything he says with a generic 'lol' and a little winky face or a heart.

* * *

Tony and Jeanne are eating frozen yogurt at this trendy little FroYo place that Jeanne's obsessed with when she mentions the break-in.

He's eating his chocolate frozen yogurt suspiciously, trying to discern the difference between ice cream and yogurt with his tongue, and he almost chokes. "_What_?"

Jeanne nods seriously, licking her plastic spoon for any last remnants of her teeny bowl of low-fat vanilla. "Yeah. Daddy said they disarmed the security system somehow and went through his office and the basement safe. We don't think anything's missing, but . . . "

"That's . . . good," he says finally, and goes back to his fake ice cream. The sunshine dims and flickers away like a flashlight low on battery as storm clouds congregate overhead.

* * *

He's waiting at the window when she appears, wearing a braid and shorts that make her tan legs look like they go on forever. The fact that he is noticing this at such a time only infuriates him further.

"Hi," says Ziva, smiling and slightly breathless, propping her elbows against the windowsill and balancing side-saddle on the branch to keep her balance.

"Don't you 'hi' me."

She cocks an eyebrow. "What?"

"You broke into the Benoit's?" he demands, refusing to move and allow her entry.

"Are you going to let me in?" Ziva inquires in turn, knuckles paling slightly in a tight grip as a sharp gust of late spring wind sets the tree branches shaking.

"No," he says stubbornly. The wind is picking up, making the early leaves hiss and rattle urgently. "Not until I get an explanation."

Ziva sighs. "What did you think we were planning to do, Tony?"

"I don't know!" he snaps. "But that's, like, a crime! You could get taken away to juvi or whatever, and then what was the point of this whole thing-"

"There is nothing at the scene to incriminate us," she answers haughtily, wincing as a blast of thunder sounds overhead. "I was careful."

"Okay, fine. But what the hell is up with you breaking into their basement? Their safe? What were you trying to do - rob them?"

"I was making it look like an ordinary break-in," Ziva retorts. "I was not planning on taking anything."

"Don't go back there," he warns harshly as the first drops of rain fall outside the window. "I can gather the intel myself-"

"I thought," she says coolly, drawing back from the sill and instead securing herself by wrapping her hands around the wide length of the branch she is perched on, "that you wanted to come home as soon as possible, by any means necessary. Was that not why you began dating the Benoit girl?"

"Well, yeah, but-" Tony trails off, because it sounds terrible the way Ziva is so bluntly phrasing it.

She searches his face with dark eyes for a moment, and then she smiles strangely and nods. The rain is falling hard now, dotting her t-shirt and catching in her eyelashes. "But that is no longer why you are dating her, is it?"

"Look," he says finally, because he doesn't _know_, "all I'm asking is that we keep this as legal as possible, okay? No more crazy hacking FBI files and climbing through people's windows-"

Too late, he realizes what it sounds like, and he tries to backtrack, but Ziva has already dropped from her branch to land, cat-like, in the dark, wet grass below.

"Understood," she says, with an ironic little salute and a twisted half-smile, and then she walks away.  
Tony slams the window so hard that a web of minute cracks skitters across the pane of glass and is soon dotted with raindrops.

He goes to bed.

* * *

_Dear Tony,_

_Since you're not answering my texts, I'm resorting to the ancient practice of email. I hope you appreciate this. _

_We've pretty much got enough stuff to go to the police. But I'm not going to send it in without your say-so, so . . . what do you say?_

_I don't know what's up with you, but things are pretty slow here. Abby dyed her hair black. She's been going through a Goth phase, fashion-wise, and it's totally freaking Jenny out. She thinks she's depressed or whatever, but Abby's still Abby. I kind of like the hair color, actually._

_Ziva's pissed at you. She won't tell me why, but I assume it's got something to do with the fact that she no longer sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night. You should talk to her before she goes all ninja and comes and kills you._

_Everybody sends their love, or whatever. Let me know about telling the police, ok?_

_- McGee_

* * *

It's been a week, and Tony still hasn't responded.

Because, _yeah_, his life here kinda sucks. But his dad leaves him alone and he doesn't have any real responsibilities and the housekeeper comes and cleans his room once a week and that's enough, right?

Plus he's got Jeanne and he's got a reputation at school as a cool kid and there's already a shiny red sports car sitting in the garage, just waiting for his birthday, and what more could he want?

So he goes to sleep and he pretends he doesn't dream about smiling animals and little hands with dirty fingernails and an entire world of fantasy originating from the yellow bramble of an overgrown bush in a grassy backyard.

* * *

The closest he gets to fantasy nowadays is when he watches Jeanne dance and when he plays the piano.

Jeanne has been teaching him for over a year now and he's pretty good, yeah, but the times he finds the most release in the music is when he's angry or when it feels like there's a cold wind whistling hollowly through a shattered pane of glass inside him. Then he just crashes his fingers down, on the same worn ivory that his mother cried on, and slams out harsh, dissonant chords that somehow correspond.

It's more bitter than beautiful and it hurts - god, it hurts - but he feels better afterwards.

* * *

Jeanne asks him one day why he never locks his bedroom window - "Anybody could just climb right in" - and he doesn't know how to explain that, yes, that's the point. He slams the lock into place that night and pretends it doesn't hurt.

He's trying to make a point, locking out the hazily-remembered summers of a life he's left behind, which persist in lurking in the shadowed undersides of the leaves outside his window.

He's Wendy - shut up, it's just an analogy, ok? - and his Peter Pan had angry eyes and, like, Fallopian tubes, but . . .

But in the end he knows what it's like, to sit on a windowsill with one bare foot in the air and one brushing toes against a cold hardwood floor, and remember how it felt to fly.

* * *

He puts Arch'bald on a shelf, all by himself, at the top of his closet.

It's like a museum exhibit of a precious relic, only he never looks at it if he can help it.

Jeanne never asks what became of the small, worn bear who used to watch them kiss with sadly-smiling button eyes.

Tony kinda resents her for it.

* * *

His dad comes home drunk again, vomits on the foyer floor, passes out on the couch.

Tony turns the shower on as hot as it will go and stands under the powerful stream until his skin no longer registers the heat.

* * *

Jeanne tells him she loves him.

* * *

He's fifteen and he doesn't believe in Santa Claus and it doesn't even snow.

Abby sends him a letter and a present, wrapped cheerily in red and green paper and decorated with a big rubber spider left over from Halloween.

Tony doesn't open it. (Presents are for the good boys and girls, and all he's done is use a girl who loves him and hurt a girl he loves.)

The present goes on the shelf with Arch'bald. He closes the closet door.

* * *

His dad takes him out to dinner and proceeds to drunk on expensive champagne, boasting over the money he's making with Mr. Benoit and saying proudly that, really, Tony isn't such a bad kid at all. A chip of the ol' block, really.

Just because he secretly agrees with Senior doesn't mean it hurts any less.

**Please review. I just want to know if you even like what I did with this. I do, personally, but is the vaguely paralleled plot line too out-there? Please let me know what you think, as well as what your favorite lines/sections were...  
**

**Whoa. Guys. I literally just discovered five seconds ago how to insert the official line-break thingies. And I think I put them in correctly, but I'm not sure at all, so if the format's totally screwed, let me know, okay? I'll go back and fix it. But the line breaks are just way prettier so I couldn't resist trying them out. :)  
**

**Lastly - ZOMG DA SEASON FINALE! Seriously. I want everybody's opinion. I don't even know HOW to feel... except slightly empty, because now we have to wait until freaking SEPTEMBER to watch my bbs again and I don't think I'll survive 'til then! Anyway, I want to hear what YOU (yes, YOU) thought of it! Please.  
**

**Love and Jellybeans ~ Styx  
**


	3. Chapter 3

**Um. HI. I'm Styx and I do not deserve you guys, with your lovely words and reviews that I haven't replied to and I bet you're all so mad at me right now, since I promised I'd update this forever ago. Well. Here's the deal. NCIS ended. Remember that? That devastating season finale that blew everyone's minds? Yeah. And then I went in series withdrawal. Happens all the time. And then I went exploring other fandoms to distract myself and I got caught up reading some fabulous, crazy, humbling work. And then FINALS happened. School finals. DEATH. **

**In other words, a combination of my fangirling and my real life got the better of me and I contracted severe writer's block. And then I'm working on this new 24 Author Hunger Games collaboration story (see my profile for more info on that) which kept me pretty busy for a while. So I've been chipping away at this chapter whenever I had a free moment, and I finally clumped together enough crap for it to be considered a chapter.  
**

**Honestly, I kinda think it sucks. Is it just me or is the style getting way repetitive? I seriously cannot END this thing. One more chapter. Or maybe two. I DON'T KNOW. My mind doesn't work right!  
**

**Sorry. That's basically what all that says. I'll try to update again soon. School's ending, so hopefully 'soon' means next week as opposed to... whenever it was that I updated last. Love you guys, please review, etc.  
**

**Disclaimer: TEN THOUSAND YEARS!... can give you SUCH a crick in the neck!  
**

* * *

He tells Jeanne he loves her on Valentine's day.

Tony's not really sure if it's true, but she's beautiful and she loves him and she's the one genuinely good thing left in his life.

She deserves better, but she wants _him_.

And who is he to deny the lovely lady her every heart's desire?

* * *

_Dear Tony, _

_How are things? We haven't heard from you in a while, so we're just checking in. Hope you're well. I'm sure the kids would love if you could come and visit soon. _

_Love, Jenny_

* * *

It's a sunny day in spring, almost a year since that day. Jeanne's head is on his stomach and they're laying in the grass behind his house, twisting dandelion stems until the plants' stringy insides have leaked milky blood all over their fingertips.  
It's a good day. His dad isn't home and everything's quiet and warm and Tony's feeling too lazy to be guilty.

His phone, laying next to him under a cluster of white-topped dandelions, rings.

"Don't answer it," says Jeanne sleepily, shifting her head on his abdomen and squinting against the sun. He obeys.

It's not until he checks his messages later that afternoon, while Jeanne is picking dandelion fluff from her hair, that he gets the news.

_"Tony."_

It's McGee, and he sounds shaken. Numbed.

_"Um, I know that we've . . . lost touch,_" the younger boy continues hesitantly, _"but I thought that you should know anyway."_

There's a pause and a deep inhale, then: _"Jenny's in the hospital. She's been looking pretty sick lately, and today . . . she just collapsed out of nowhere. The- the doctors say she has a tumor. In her head. I-"_

There's another long pause, during which Tony can hear Tim's shuddery breathing.

_"We're heading to the hospital now to visit her. Anyway, we don't expect you to come or anything, but . . . But I thought you deserved to hear it from one of us. I'll text you and tell you how she's doing later, if- if you want."_

Another silence.

_"Okay. Hope you're okay and everything. Abby misses you. . . Bye."_

McGee inhales again, like maybe he's going to say something further, but he seems to think better of it and simply hangs up with a sigh.

Tony numbly lowers the phone from his ear and tries to swallow, only it doesn't work because his throat is as dry and scratchy as the grass beneath him.

Jeanne eyes him as her fingers weave her brown hair, now free of dandelion residue, into a braid that snakes over one shoulder. "Everything okay?"

It's not. But he just nods dully and stands. "Let's go back to the house."

* * *

McGee texts him only once, later that same evening - a short, terse message stating that the tumor is not cancerous, but is causing pressure in the brain and must be dealt with ASAP.

Tony finally works up the nerve to respond with a hesitant _'That's good, right? That it's not cancerous?'_

McGee doesn't text back.

* * *

Ziva's laying on his bed when he slumps up the stairs that night, stretched out flat on her back with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She doesn't look away, even though he's sure she heard him approach.

"Hi," he says breathlessly. He's not even really surprised, because he knows her, and he knows that some things are more important even than forgiveness to Ziva.

She's gotten prettier. It's only been a year, but she's taller and thinner and curvier and more finished-looking than before. He notices because he's a soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old guy and because she's a girl and she's laying on his bed and she's _Ziva_.

"Hi," she says tonelessly.

"What happened?" he asks after an awkward moment of silence, coming to perch on the bed, carefully ensuring that there is roughly two good feet of space between her legs and his. "How long's Jenny been sick?"

She gets up and begins to rove the room restlessly, her mouth pulled down at the corners. "A while."

"Oh."

"I have not forgiven you," she says abruptly, turning from her contemplation of a paint chip on the wall to glare at him. "I just-"

He gets up and hesitantly approaches her, palms open to show he means no harm, because she's wild and she's dangerous and she's wounded. They stand a few feet apart and take in each other and they resent.

"How's Gibbs?"

Her eyes are watching him, distrustful and hard to read. "Coping."

He nods. He can imagine Gibbs, all cold eyes and harsh words on the outside, falling to pieces on the inside. That's just how he works, shutting people out and hiding behind a facade abrasive enough to set even the thickest-skinned bleeding. "And you?"

She hesitates. "I- I don't know."

They fall into silence, watchful and resentful and fearful.

"Are you okay?" he asks finally, probing with tentative words. Maybe she hates him and maybe he hates what she represents for him, but in the end he still cares. He can't _not_.

Something in Ziva's eyes is broken when she inhales audibly and whispers "No" on her exhale.

He doesn't know who moves first. He just knows that suddenly Ziva's back is pressed flat against the bedroom wall, and he's kissing her and she's kissing him, but it oddly doesn't taste anything like forgiveness.

After an eternity of nothing but _her_, he pulls away - _he's got a girlfriend, dammit_ - and nobody says a word as she slips back over the windowsill, closing the window with a bang behind her.

* * *

They don't speak at all when Father's Day rolls around, because his father is passed out, drunk, on the couch downstairs and she's _there_ and he doesn't know anything about her history, but he thinks she needs it just as much as he does.

He's the one who makes the first move. She's the one who eventually pulls away.

Her fingernails leave ten pink crescent moons in the soft skin at the nape of his neck. She closes the window behind her.

* * *

Jeanne's suspicious.

She pretends like she's not, but her fingernails dig into his palms sometimes, when they're together and he's not looking at her.

* * *

For his sixteenth birthday, his Dad declares grandly - like he's doing Tony a _favor_ or something - that he will be out of town for the weekend.

"You've got the run of the place, Junior," he says with a wink. "You know where I keep the liquor. Just don't do anything I wouldn't."

Which isn't saying very much at all.

So he throws a party, because that's what's expected of him, but he hardly has the opportunity to eat or drink anything, because Jeanne is very consistent in her endeavors to get him alone.

"Why don't I introduce you to some people?" he begins, but she simply smiles slyly and tugs a bit harder on his hand.

"I have a better idea," Jeanne states wickedly.

He stares at her. "You're not drunk, are you?"

She's sober, as it turns out. She tastes only of cherry coke and the gross, flavorless baked potato chips she had insisted were the only snack foods that complied with her diet when she finally succeeds in wrangling him away from his guests and into the coat closet, of all places.

Tony breathes in the musty smell of closeted outerwear and Jeanne's perfume and is eternally grateful that she doesn't notice the slightly raised welts that Ziva marked into his skin.

* * *

Jeanne's not drunk, but she's a girl who lived the greater portion of her life in loneliness. Tony sees the fear in her eyes every time he absent-mindedly kisses her forehead and she thinks he's not looking.

He's been _hers_ for two years now, even if it wasn't real for the first year or so, and she can feel the sudden lack of tension in the hand that holds hers.

She grips even tighter.

* * *

For the first time since he left the house at age thirteen, Abby doesn't send him a birthday gift.

Tony leans against the frame of his closet door and consults with the perpetually-smiley Arch'bald, but all that is returned is the blank stare of two glassy black buttons.

* * *

"Jenny's home," Ziva says, swinging her legs over to dangle above the hardwood floor, but remaining perched on the windowsill. "The doctors think the tumor may have been eradicated."

She's smiling.

He kisses her so hard that she nearly topples backwards out the window. It is only the fierce grip of her arms around his neck that stops her from plummeting.

It's still not forgiveness, but he can feel her smiling against his mouth, and she says goodbye before dropping out of sight.

It's not forgiveness, but it's a start.

* * *

His dad comes home drunk. Again.

Tony just continues to brush his teeth. He goes to bed.

* * *

_Tony-_

_We're having a party to celebrate Jenny's successful surgery (not that you'd care, obviously), and despite all my protests, Jenny wants you there. _

_You don't deserve to come. I hope you know that. I hope you know that I wouldn't help you come home now if you begged. You ABANDONED us, DiNozzo! _

_I don't understand how you could just WALK AWAY like you did, when we were trying to help you, and then not even come visit when your own surrogate-mother was in the HOSPITAL! _

_That is NOT how a family works. That much I know. _

_So come to the party. It's the least you can do. But don't you dare expect any of us to welcome you with open arms. _

_-Abby. _

* * *

It's the closest he's come to crying since he left the gray (purple) house with the rhododendrons.

* * *

"Tell me you love me," Jeanne murmurs into his neck, her fingers clenching his like a bear trap.

The back of his neck aches, something akin to vertigo, and he digs the fingers of his free hand into the arm of the couch hard enough to mar its smooth, leather surface. "What?"

Jeanne straightens from her cuddling position and turns to regard him seriously. "You never say it. I tell you all the time, but you almost never say it back."

"This is a good part," Tony says abruptly, pretending to turn his attention back to the screen.

Her fingernails bite into his palm, but she simply puts her head back on his shoulder and sighs quietly.

He pretends he doesn't notice.

* * *

It's summer, and he's feeling reckless, so when Ziva slithers in through the window to inform him that, yes, he _will_ be at Jenny's party tomorrow, lest she be forced to hurt him, he agrees and asks her to stay.

They skirt across the sturdy branches of the oak outside and stretch out flat on their backs on the wide, gentle slop of the rooftop, drinking juice boxes patterned with Clifford the Big Red Dog, which Tony discovers so far back in the pantry that he suspects the package may be a relic of his toddler years with his father. The juice is most definitely expired, but it tastes good all the same.

"Abby does not mean it," Ziva says abruptly, the slender plastic straw caught gently between her teeth. "She misses you."

"She hates me," Tony responds gloomily, craning his neck and relishing the feel of sunlight gently brushing the valley between his jaw and his collarbones. "She's made that pretty clear."

"She's . . . hurt," Ziva says slowly, pausing like she's carefully selecting her words. "It is hard for her to understand what it's like to . . . to be anyone other than herself, you know?"

Tony sort of gets it. Abby's world consists of black and white, dark hair dye and fair skin, heroes and villains, and fairy tales with happy endings. And she'll forever be a lost boy, a child who can never fathom the painful, dull intensity of growing pains.

"Is it weird," he says finally, joking because that's what he does, "that the most well-adjusted one of us is a girl who dresses like a corpse?"

Ziva laughs, but then turns her head to regard him thoughtfully. "She had it better than the rest of us. She doesn't- doesn't _remember_ what . . . She doesn't remember anything but the purple house."

Tony shrugs. "Yeah, but I hardly remember anything either. And it wasn't anything that traumatizing. And, I mean, I'm kinda a jerk . . . "

"Yes," she concedes, "but Abby was not asked to leave the only home she has ever really known, her real family . . . "

She's breathing quietly next to him, chewing idly on the straw of her now-empty juice box and stretching her bare toes towards the sun, and suddenly the idea of her hating him is really too much to bear.

"Do you think I'm a bad person?"

Ziva blows air out through the straw, making a gentle whistling noise, and then says slowly, "I have known terrible people, who have done terrible things, in my life. And even they have a sense of humor and a family and a conscience. I don't- I do not think that there is anyone in this world who is an entirely bad person."

He nods because he understands what she means, because his dad knows how to play the piano and Mr. Benoit has photos of Jeanne, professionally backed and framed, hanging in his office.

"But do you think that I'm-"

"No," Ziva interrupts crisply. "I don't."

He tries not to smile and instead asks the first query that comes to mind:

"What bad people have you known?"

Ziva says she has to go.

* * *

The house looks exactly the same, right down to the battered soccer goal, with its netting tangled with yellowed pine needles, and the little, pigtailed girl with grave eyes sitting on the front porch swing.

It's sort of like looking in a funhouse mirror, looking at Abby. She's exactly the same, but entirely different, with her cheekbones more pronounced and her dimples even deeper. Her eyes are lined with black and her lips are a cherry red and they're turned down, glaring at him.

This time around, he doesn't say anything to the little girl, just drowns in the hollow feeling in his gut.

This time around, Abby says a word far more offensive than 'stupid' and leaves without another word, slamming the front door behind her.

* * *

Timmy's tall and bone-thin and he quirks his mouth grimly when Tony raises a hand in a limp kind of greeting.

He turns away.

* * *

Gibbs shakes his hand and asks after his well-being gruffly. He's maybe the only one so far who has looked at Tony without hurt puzzlement or flat-out resentment in his eyes.

Instead he squeezes his shoulder kindly and hands him a plate of freaking _delicious_ steak and tells him it's good to see him.

* * *

Jenny looks . . . sick. Her face is pasty and her pretty red mermaid hair is cropped short. For a second Tony's afraid to hug her, she looks so fragile.

Then she wraps him in a fierce, maternal hug that smells like the perfume he remembers scrunching up his nose at. Tony hugs back tentatively, and basks in the glow of unconditional love.

There's pity in her eyes as she turns away to greet the other guests, but he can't bring himself to hate her for it.

* * *

It's kind of awful.

Like, the food is really good and Ziva's wearing these fantastic (short) shorts, but it still basically sucks because he's a stranger.

He knows every inch of this backyard - the corner where they attempted to camp until a particularly loud neighborhood dog frightened them back into the safety of the house, the flowering bramble that was their castle, the grill where Gibbs worked culinary wonders, the patchy grass where the sprinkler was perpetually entertaining one sweaty kid or another - and yet he is no longer a resident of this tiny, fence-enclosed Neverland.

Also there's some kid who lives down the street that Tony vaguely remembers playing street soccer with as kids and he's blatantly ogling Ziva.

And Ziva's totally aware that he's doing it.

And not doing anything about it.

Which is, okay, _irritating_. To say the least.

Eventually she takes pity on him, sitting alone on a deck chair he doesn't remember, and strides over, with her short shorts and a sloppy braid of dark curls spilling over her shoulder, to half-smile at him crookedly.

"You came."

He shrugs and can't help but smirk back. "Yeah. This crazy chick climbed into my window and told me I had to or she'd skin me with a butter knife. So here I am."

A smile crosses Ziva's face like a lightning strike, and she grabs his hands and yanks him to his feet as if he were a rag doll. "Come on."

She's still holding his hands. Tony doesn't protest as she leads him across the yard in her bare feet, ducking to avoid a Frisbee thrown with Palmer's terrible aim, and into the odd stillness of the forest that hedges the backyard.

They reach a familiar castle of sun-warmed boulders surrounded by a moat of sunshine-yellow flowers and bramble. Ziva waits patiently as Tony kicks off his shoes, lest he contaminate their childhood sanctuary with foreign soil, and then tugs him down after her as she ducks into the underbrush.

They still sort of fit. Sort of.

They sit there with their knees tented and bumping against each other, toes tangled, in the hollow under the hydrangeas and the crevice between two of the larger boulder, and stare at each other.

There are yellow petals tangled in the stray curls that escaped Ziva's braid and there's a branch digging into his neck.

They laugh, because it suddenly seems ludicrous to try to jam themselves back into these childhood molds, after they've hurt each other, after he's pressed her back against a wall and kissed her, hard.

But neither moves.

Her hand finds his once more and they sit there in comfortable companionship until darkness falls and the mosquitoes begin to swarm.

* * *

This time Ziva's the only one on the porch when he drives away, flipping him off when he honks obnoxiously at her.

He knows abruptly that there's no way he can ever come back here the same again.

* * *

Jeanne and Tony are hanging out on the porch - in other words, Jeanne is complaining about some girl in her ballet class and Tony is being sarcastic and not particularly sympathetic - when Senior stumbles out of his car looking disgruntled and disoriented and, well, drunk.

"Hi, Dad," he says casually, and returns to pretending to listen to Jeanne whilst browsing through the treasure trove of random brilliance that is OMGfacts.

"Was he-"

"Drunk? Yeah."

"Does he-"

"Do that a lot? Yeah."

When he looks up, Jeanne is staring at him in soft-eyed sympathy. He pats her hand, says he has homework, that he'll text her later, and retreats into the air-conditioned, nonjudgmental sanctuary of his nearly empty house.

He ends up calling Ziva and she climbs nimbly through his window using only one hand, the other tucked around a frosty container of ice cream sandwiches.

They sit on the sill and stretch their legs in the sunlight until there is melted ice cream all over his hands and a smile on her face, until he can't hear his father's retches over the musicality of Ziva's laughter.

* * *

It's funny the way his life suddenly seems not-so-bad, even though his father's drunken nights are slowly and surely progressing into drunken afternoons and drunken mornings, even though Jeanne is clingy and fearful and stifling, simply because he has stumbled across a shard of mirror that allows him to look back to the way things were in the gray house.

Ziva's sharp and cold and fragmented, but she's beautiful when laughter takes her face like a summer storm, and she understands.

He's rifed with cracks, like veiny spider webs, but she's just as broken - he knows because she still flinches when thunder rolls.

There's no judgment or sympathy, they simply reflect the cold, hard truth of it back at each other and rejoice in the rare beam of sunlight that plays across their fragmented surfaces, refracted back and forth like a prism, like a yellow castle of blossoms that once held the world.

* * *

Tony texts McGee on a whim one day, when he's feeling brave because it's too hot to think, and invites him over to _"watch something geeky."_

Tim doesn't text back.

Instead he shows up on Tony's doorstep an hour later with a backpack full of _Star Wars_ movies and a industrial-sized package of Skittles.

They throw rainbow-shelled candies at each other and squabble over which movies are the best - the prequels or the originals - but they both agree that Princess Leia is hot in her weird, alien prostitute bikini, and they get caught between a hug and a handshake when McGee finally has to leave.

It's kind of amazing.

* * *

_"Leave a message after the beep-"_

"Dad? It's me. Um. Yeah. Maybe you forgot, we were supposed to go out to dinner with the Benoits tonight. Just- just call me back, okay?"

He hangs up.

"You know what?" Jeanne says presently, rocking back and forth in her rose-colored flats and making her flowy, flowered dress swish against her thighs. "I think maybe I'll just call Daddy and have him come get me. He can cancel the reservations and we can do the whole 'family dinner' thing another day, okay?"

It's raining loudly outside. A car whizzes by, puddled rainwater rearing up in its wake like flames. Tony watches it go.

"Yeah. Okay. Sorry."

Jeanne presses a kiss to his jaw, the highest part of him she can reach in her flats. He's really pretty tall now, and girls think he's good looking (Tony agrees, truthfully), even though Ziva says otherwise. He thinks maybe she's just jealous 'cause she's still super petite.

"Hey. I'm used to this stuff." Jeanne shrugs. "I've learned not to get my hopes up, you know? I'll just keep quiet about it and then bring it up next time I want something, so he'll feel guilty and say yes."

Tony smirks half-heartedly. "Since when are you so devious?"

"Since when are you so preoccupied?" she counters.

He doesn't answer. She tries calling her dad. He redials his own father's number.

No answer.

"Voicemail," says Jeanne, looking puzzled. "He _never_ sends me to voicemail! He _always_ picks up, even when he's at the office-"

Tony snorts despite himself. Jeanne looks up, startled.

"What?"

"Nothing," he backtracks, but she's got her eyes narrowed suspiciously now, marching toward him in her girly little shoes and crossing her arms like she means business.

"No. That was _something_. Tell me what you were laughing about," she commands, sounding alarmingly like the stubborn-eyed Abby who glared at him on the front porch swing only last week.

Tony shrugs, feeling bullied. "I don't know, I just thought it was funny that he _always_ answers the phone for you, even at, like, his '_meetings._' Like, he's in the middle of a deal and his phone rings and he's like, 'Oh, I have to take this - it's my daughter.'"

Jeanne blinks. "What do you mean, _a deal_?"

Oh.

"Never mind, baby," Tony says complacently.

Jeanne's eyes are narrowed, like she wants to pursue, but her phone rings and after a moment she answers it, eyes still fixed on his face. "Hi, Daddy . . . Yeah, we're still here . . . No, I think maybe it'd be better to just cancel . . . "

She turns away. Tony tries not to scream.

* * *

That night he and Ziva are sprawled on their stomachs across his bed, carefully sifting through an old photo album discovered in some forgotten cranny of the old gray house and remembering.

With her lashes downcast and her lips pursed in quiet preoccupation, she's beautiful. He sees the beauty in the photos, too, in the fiercely joyful grin creasing her face as she stands, tan-legged and wild-haired, in an over-long white T-shirt on a darkened beach he only sort of remembers.

He thinks about telling her, but his phone vibrates just as he opens his mouth.

From: Jeanne

HOW DID YOU KNOW

/

To: Jeanne

your capslock button would like to register a domestic abuse complaint

/

From: Jeanne

TONY!

/

To: Jeanne

JEANNE!

/

Ziva looks up questioningly from a picture of Burt and Susie Mae's wedding reception, where a shower curtain-bedecked Abby is dancing with an overall-clad Timmy, beaming so widely that her grin seems to split her face in two.

"I believe it is rude to ignore your guests in favor of your cell phone," she says sweetly, pretending to pout. "Would you prefer I left you to your electronics?"

"No," he says hastily. "Just hold on a sec. I think-"

His phone buzzes again, Jeanne's picture appearing on the screen to signal an incoming call. Tony sighs and sits up on the bed. "I'm sorry. I have to-"

Ziva flicks his ear casually and returns to scrutinizing a simply _ancient_ picture of Gibbs and Jenny and Mr. Fornell at a block party - it's so old that Fornell actually has _hair_ - with wondering eyes.

"Hello?"

"_Tony_!" Jeanne wails.

He sighs. "Hi, baby. What's u-"

"Don't pretend you don't know!" she barks, sounding nearly hysterical.

Tony blinks. "Um. What?"

"My dad," she hisses fiercely. "How the _hell_ did you know that- that he's, like, a c- _criminal_ or- or something? I- _I_ didn't even know that, I-"

"You . . . didn't know that?"

"_NO_!" Jeanne sobs.

"Well- well what did you _think_ he did?" Tony stumbles, feeling both sympathetic and incredulous.

"I- I don't know. S-s-something to do with, like, banking?" Jeanne is crying in earnest now, and Tony feels a bit guilty for not being more sympathetic. "Like- like what _you_r dad does?"

His mouth quirks ironically. "My dad invests in shady business scams and rips people off, Jeanne. He's just as much of a criminal as-"

"_DON'T_!" The sudden hysterical fervor in her voice momentarily takes him back. "I- I mean . . . Maybe- maybe what he _does_ is bad, but- but he's still my _dad_! Right?"

"Um. Right," he agrees dully, flopping back onto the bed and pulling a face at the ceiling. Ziva, perhaps attempting to pat his cheek sympathetically without looking away from the scrapbook, merely succeeds in poking Tony in the eye. His yelp of protest is entirely masked by Jeanne's unhappy groan and Ziva's chuckles.

"I just can't believe this," Jeanne whimpers. "How did you know?"

"I. Um. My dad . . . " Tony flounders, but it seems that Jeanne is more intent on lamenting than listening, and so eventually he lowers his phone's volume, props it between his cheek and his neck, and returns to sniggering with Ziva over Gibbs' mustache and Jenny's bra-less days.

* * *

Things go down hill from there, from that hazy evening in late July, hurtling downhill as rapidly as the days flick by.

It starts with another phone call.

This time it's Senior who answers it. It's Senior's face that blanches from its ruddy, alcoholic flush to a corpse-like pallor, then goes bright red all over again as he yells into the phone so loud that his words bounce and echo in the vast emptiness of the house.

When he comes out of his office, having hung up the phone, he slams the French door so hard that cracks skitter across one of the frosted glass panes.

He doesn't say a single word for the rest of the night. He simply opens the liquor cabinet, with its polished walnut framing and the flasks of amber liquid that used to remind Tony of a wizard's magic potion.

Tony sits at the dinner table in silence and watches Senior drink.

He doesn't think his father has ever looked quite so old before.

* * *

They break up.

Which isn't surprising. There was only a period of maybe six months where Tony actually felt anything other than tolerant affection for his girlfriend of three years, and that was because he'd felt so damn _alone_.

It's Jeanne who breaks up with him.

That's the surprising part.

"Daddy says that I can't see you anymore," she sobs into the phone, and Tony finds enough gratitude in his heart for this girl, this girl who was maybe even lonelier than he had been, who had everything in the world except people who loved her for who _she_ was, rather than what she could give them.

He pretends he's devastated. He never really loved her, but he says that he did. It's important for everyone to feel wanted.

"Daddy says he's not working with your dad anymore," Jeanne sniffles. "He doesn't trust him. I think he's mad, because- because I confronted him. About what he, you know, _does_. He never wanted me to find out."

Tony doesn't know what to say.

"And," she continues, "he says that you were- were just dating me because your dad was trying to get close to him. He said you didn't actually like me-"

It's true, sort of. Only, really, it's worse than that. Because the thing is, he really _did_ like Jeanne. And he really _did_ use her, but it was for his own agenda. Which makes him just as bad as - _worse than_ - his father. First it was to get him home. Then it was to make him feel like he _did_ have a home.

"Was any of it real?" sobs Jeanne.

Tony takes a breath. He lies. To tell the truth would be to break a lonely girl's heart, possibly irreparably. "Of course it was, baby," he croons. "My dad had nothing to do with this! Remember at the Yankee game? When we made the sign and we got to be on TV?"

Jeanne giggles tearfully. "And your hair looked really stupid, sticking up behind the poster."

"Are you kidding me? I looked awesome!"

They talk and banter and he tells her he loves her before he hangs up.

It's sort of truthful, even if the kind of love he feels for her is more protective, brought on by countless guilty nights, than lovey-dovey romantic.

And then it's over.

That's that. He's single.

He wonders why he immediately thinks of Ziva.

* * *

That same night his father careens his vintage Cadillac convertible through the garage door at three in the morning as he returns from a night of heavy drinking.

The next day he mutters into his DiNozzo Defibrillator that he is turning over a new leaf.

"No more drinking. I'm gonna get myself an honest job and send you to a good college, Junior, so you're never gonna have to live the way I lived, 'ssociating with the likes of Benoit."

There's this stupid instant where Tony starts picturing games of catch and fishing trips and a hand gripping his shoulder in fatherly pride. And it feels amazing and for a second it's real.

And then his dad laces the Defib with vodka, just to 'get his head on straight', and knocks the whole thing back like it's an ice cream soda.

The bubble bursts. The office door's glazed window pane is still lacy with cracks.

* * *

The sun is high in the sky as August dawns.

Jeanne's gone. Dad's drunk.

But it's still okay, irrationally, because Ziva lets him kiss her now, even when they're not fighting or grieving or rejoicing. Sometimes she evens initiates the contact.

That's why he knows something's wrong the moment she steps into his room, barefoot and wild-eyed and soaking wet, out of the rain.

"Jenny's tumor is back."

She chokes on something that might have been a sob, had she not swallowed it back so forcibly, and looks him straight in the face with eyes he doesn't recognize.

"They do not think it is going to go away this time."

* * *

He sits in the driveway for nearly half an hour, trying to breathe. Ziva's sitting next to him, dripping water from the curling tips of her messy hair onto the leather seat, forehead pressed to the glass of the window. Every time she blinks, her eyelashes brush against the pane with a soft noise like the _tick_ of a clock.

_Tick. Tick. Tick. Years and years of seconds and he never took one to say thank you. Tick. Tick. Tick. _

He gets out of the car before he can stop himself, striding up the driveway, which is awash with a rainbow of smeared pastels, chalky spirals warped by the thundering rainstorm.

Abby opens the door (some things never change) and stiffens like her muscles have seized up. For a second her eyes flick to the pale hand that still grips the doorknob, like she's thinking about slamming it in his face, but Ziva steps forward before the tense silence has had time to settle.

"Abby," she says briskly, like she's not soaking wet and wide-eyed and lost, "it is raining and we are cold. Please let us in."

Abby does, her face still stiff with shock. She closes the door behind them, stares at it for a long second, and then slams a fist, hard, against the wood. She bolts up the stairs without a word.

* * *

Gibbs explains, like Tony's an adult and not just that little lost boy with the green eyes who grew up and went bad, that there isn't enough money.

There never really has been a lot of money, but there was always enough.

But there's not anymore, and Jenny's ghostly white and her hair is falling out, and there are fourteen kids in the house - more than ever before - and two of them are just babies.

There are too many numbers in the equation.

"They're relocating the kids to foster homes," says Gibbs, with his jaw set and his blue eyes just _daring_ Tony to tell him he's wrong. "It's the only thing left to do."

He leaves feeling more hollow than he ever has before.

Gibbs has given up.

* * *

He goes home and sits at the dinner table, chin in his hands, and watches his father drown in the alcohol.

It's the first time he's ever been tempted to join him.

* * *

**So. Obviously I still haven't been able to finish this bad boy up. Too many subplots and too many facets of character and too many schmancy words that just NEED to be used. **

**Anyway, I know I was awful about updating this (along with everything else, sorry!) but I really could use a few reviews to reassure me that this isn't just becoming repetitious angst with lots of big words thrown in. Anyone?  
**

**By the way, my darling friend mangagirl135, my newest convert to NCIS, published her first chapter of her first NCIS story yesterday. (Which I have yet to review, sorry love!) Go check it out. Because I told you to. And she's pretty awesome. (btw, Mags, see if you found my shout-out to you. It's in there :D)  
**

**Also (more advertisement, sorry!) if you like The Hunger Games, go to my profile (which I am about to update) to find out more about this AH-mazing new collaboration fic I'm working on.  
**

**And that wraps that up. I think. I love you guys. Thank you so much for your fantabulous reviews. Please keep 'em coming so I don't die of writer's block! :)  
**


	4. Chapter 4

**Please don't hate me. I mean, yeah, you definitely have a right to... but you have no idea how messed up my head is right now. Not that I'm undergoing any particular stress or hardship or anything... I don't know. My muse like decided to take a bath with a plugged-in toaster oven or something, and everything I've written lately (including this) just... disgusts me. But I am really sorry, and you guys are fantastic, and I honestly don't deserve you. **

**Also? yeah, this still isn't finished. I'm such a loser. Sorry. My brain is such a stupid place right now.  
**

**Disclaimer: I own... oh, yeah - NOTHING  
**

He has a solution in mind before he's even consciously starting pondering what to do.

Honestly, it's incredibly simple.

All he has to do is persuade his father into coughing up enough to foot the medical bills. And then, _BAM_, Jenny's okay and he, Tony, is the superhero who swooped in and saved the day.

And maybe that would be enough.

Tony knows he can't buy his way back into the family, but that doesn't really matter so much anymore.

What matters is that he doesn't let this last perfect little sanctuary, the purple - it's purple, okay, he'll admit it, he'll do anything, anything - shatter and spray its shards of warped perfection back into the tumultuous, harsh world, where they'll all just dissolve in the cold acidity of it all.

Because Tony's finally started to realize what a selfish, awful person he is.

(Ziva says he's not a bad person. But Tony knows that Ziva lies sometimes, just like he knows that Ziva cries sometimes.)

Tony knows he's not the same boy as the boy who left the purple house, the boy who so innocently hugged his best friends goodbye, who really, truly hoped for a second that his Dad had changed.

The real world spoiled him, twisted him, warped him into this callous, juvenile, self-centered person who really sort of despises himself.

Tony doesn't belong, doesn't deserve to belong, in the purple house anymore. But he can't let the real world pervert naive, idealistic Abby or sweet, insightful Tim or tragically brave Ziva.

He's just Tony. He's not selflessly high-minded or compassionate or even brave. But he can do this - he can protect his family.

He tells Ziva, when she silently scales the tree and stretches out beside him on the rooftop that night, that this is the _least_ he can do to make up for...

(It's become a habit of theirs, to stretch out on the fading, sun-warmed heat of the roof shingles and hold hands and let their sentences dangle into the cavernous verity of the truths they can't face.)

He's so earnest that his voice shakes tightly with all the pent-up vigor, and by the time he's finished, Ziva has shifted positions.

"I was not lying," she says sharply, planting a hand on either side of his head and effectively paralyzing him with the directness of her glare, "when I told you that you were not a bad person."

"I didn't say that."

"But that is what you think, yes?"

Her breath is hot on his face. Her eyes are dark and intense. He can't find it in him to lie to her, so he just says earnestly, "I can do this, Ziva. I can persuade my dad to foot the bills - I'll work for the money, even - and I can save Jenny. I can-"

"I believe you," she says, softer now, but with a quieter, fiercer intensity to her words.

He can't bring himself to corrupt her blazing, dark perfection by kissing her, so instead he just grips her hands and counts the stars that he can make out through the clouds.

* * *

Senior just looks at him.

"I can work for the money," says Tony wildly. "I can use my college savings, you can take it out of my graduation money... y'know, once I graduate. I can- I can-"

The beer bottle clinks indignantly as it is set down on the polished walnut coffee table, marked with countless circular markings of the countless glasses that have been set on the expensive wood without a coaster.

"I used every penny," says Senior slowly, "every penny I had on your mother. I made loans. I called in favors. I sold the cars. I was so desperate, I made bad deals. I didn't cover my tracks properly. That was how they found me, you know. They could never pin me down before that. I was that good-"

"Dad," Tony interrupts in frustration. "Dad, if you're trying to make a point-"

"I'm saying that money doesn't fix things, Junior," says Senior gravely. He laughs sardonically and knocks back a swallow of beer as he gestures vaguely around the room. "Look at us."

There's this hollow sort of wrenching feeling in Tony's gut, but he ignores it. He needs this for Jenny. Maybe it doesn't always work. _But it has to this time_.

"Dad, _please_-"

When Senior sighs it smells of bitter, acrid alcohol. He studies his beer bottle with a look of distaste, almost hatred, and then drains it. "Okay," he says. "Okay."

* * *

When he tells Ziva, she laughs.

But not skeptically, not sardonically.

It's this free, beautiful, joyful sound that echoes and throbs in Tony's chest and beats like a butterfly. It swells and flutters almost painfully when Ziva kisses him clumsily, her lips curved in a grin, her laughter tickling his lips.

They run all the way back to the purple house, and Gibbs even smiles a little bit when they arrive, breathless and barefoot and sweaty, with fingers entangled.

Tony tells him the amazing news, only just swallowing back a massive grin, and in Gibbs' eyes Tony sees a conflicted concoction of emotion - affection and sympathy and hope and hopelessness and something stiff, like injured pride.

Maybe Gibbs is used to being the good guy who saves the day. Maybe he doesn't want to accept aid from the kid who, while perhaps not the antagonist of this drama, is certainly not without blame.

But he wraps an arm around Tony in a sort of side-hug and tells him he's a good kid, but that if he keeps gallivanting around in bare feet he's going to contract tetanus and die painfully.

He can't quite bite back the grin this time around, even if he does feel like maybe Gibbs is not taking this quite as seriously as he would like.

* * *

The first thing that goes is Tony's car. He's a little sad about that, yeah, but it's not like he really has anywhere to go anyway. So they sell the car.

And then they sell their box tickets at Fenway Park. This, he doesn't care about at all. He's only gone twice since the Jeanne incident. And it reeked of memories and stale popcorn and he never ever wants to go back anyway.

He empties his savings account, his college fund. (Again. It's not like he was going anywhere anyway.)

* * *

Abby opens the door and her eyes widen to huge proportions. "Hi," she says nervously, and steps to the side to allow Anthony DiNozzo, Junior and Senior, to enter.

"Mr. DiNozzo," says Gibbs, offering a hand. "If you'd come with me, we can discuss . . . reimbursement."

Senior goes, leaving with a sort of awkward pat to Tony's shoulder, and Abby and Tony look at each other.

"I hope you know," says Abby slowly, "that this doesn't make it okay. You can't buy forgiveness."

"I know."

"Oh... " Abby shifts awkwardly from one booted foot to the other, looking a little confused.

"I'm doing this for Jenny," explains Tony honestly. "And so you guys don't have to get split up. It's not for me."

Abby stares at him for a while and then chokes out a sob, flinging her arms around him and squeezing with boa constrictor-like strength.

"I missed you," she declares, dripping tears onto his neck. Tony feels them roll beneath his collar, warm and wet and itchy. He grips back and forces himself to keep breathing.

He catches a glimpse of Ziva, smirking from the top of the stairs in an 'I told you so' fashion. He grins a little even as he has to swallow back his own tears.

* * *

It's as close to perfect as it ever can be now.

Abby texts him all the time and sends him pictures of cute baby animals or cross-dissections of frogs, and sometimes she'll call just to tell him that she's glad he's back.

Back from where, exactly, he doesn't know. But he always responds that he's glad, too.

* * *

Tony and McGee fight a lot. Friendly fighting. Spats and banter. Tony always has to stop himself from grinning pridefully when li'l Timmy comes out on top.

* * *

Tony and Ziva talk a lot. They go for walks or climb on the roof and laugh at the world. The color is slowly bleeding back into Jenny's face like a rising tide and Gibbs smiles again and they don't have to go to the foster home and sometimes he really thinks he loves her.

There's a lot they don't talk about. But that's okay; they shoot each other secret smiles and somehow it all gets understood.

* * *

It's always darkest before the dawn, isn't that what they all say?

Tony would like to take each and every member of this collective 'they' and slit their throat with a plastic spoon, because they got it all. freaking. wrong.

It's always brightest before you realize, crap, that's a falling, flaming aircraft, not a wishing star, and by that point you're already dead.

Smashed. Crushed. Obliterated. Broken and shattered and annihilated and-

* * *

Jenny dies on a Thursday, simply goes to sleep one night and never opens her eyes again.

* * *

Tony's asleep on his couch, blanketed in the silence and the flickering colors of his muted television screen, when his phone rings.

He picks up in a sort of half-asleep daze, and immediately his eardrums are splintered.

There's someone screaming, screaming, screaming, and for a second he thinks it's a prank call from a group of middle school girls high off soda and chick flicks, but then he hears Tim yelling, yelling Abby's name, telling her to stop, to stop, to stop, and then it's his breathless voice on the phone saying Tony, Tony, Jenny's dead, she's dead, she's-

Tony hangs up.

* * *

He wakes up his father, slumped over a sheaf of paperwork, snoring. Each exhale smells of booze.

"Dad," he says, only it's a lie, it must be, because just yesterday Jenny laughed at the little kids skidding along the slip-and-slide like multi-colored penguins, and how could she be dead, how? His voice sounds hollow and metallic. "Dad, Jenny's dead."

Senior looks at him. His eyes are rimmed in red. He sighs and it smells like liquor. "Oh," he says. "Oh."

The old man - because that's what he is, really, white-haired and jowled and _old_ - gets to his feet, claps his son on the shoulder so hard it hurts, and says, "Get dressed and grab the keys, Junior. I'll grab me a defib and we'll be out the door in five."

Tony insists on driving, because Senior's probably still drunk, and he pretends not to notice the string of china rosary beads dangling from the visor of his father's car.

"They were your mother's," muses Senior, reading Tony's thoughts and pointed non-glances, fingering the delicate beading with his thick fingers.

"You're drunk, Dad," says Tony roughly, and takes the next turn so sharply that the beads clink together like windchimes.

* * *

Abby is sobbing on the couch in her ladybug-patterned pajama pants and sagging pigtails. She looks no more than five.

Tim sits next to her, white and numb, with his fingernails clenched into his palm. His eyes aren't focusing properly.

Tony doesn't see Ziva. He wants to look for her, but Senior's telling him to stay here, help his friends with the little ones, while he goes to the hospital to meet Mr. Gibbs.

He nods. He sits down on the couch. Abby's sobs have melted into a throbbing mess of whimpers, and he wonders why he can still hear the screaming.

* * *

"Do not do this," says Ziva, sitting down beside him and fixing her eyes on him. He just watches the early-morning fog pool outside the window and tries not to wince when the little boy whose name he doesn't know shifts on his lap.

"Do what?."

He doesn't sound very convincing or even very human, even to himself. Ziva repeats, "Do not do this. Do not… turn this into a reason to pull back. It was not your fault."

"Then whose fault is it?" he demands. It hurts, the way the bitterness wrenches at his throat like bile.

The little boy whimpers and blinks leftover tears onto Tony's shirt. The kid doesn't even understand, really; he just cries because everyone else does. Is it wrong that Tony almost sort of hates him for it?

"Nobody's." _Why is she so damn calm?_ "Death is a natural thing. It was nobody's fault that she grew sick. If anything, you helped keep her alive for-"

"It didn't help."

Ziva's face is set, composed, but her eyes are slightly swollen. He hates that she always has to be stronger, can't even cry in front of them because that would tarnish her cold silver shield of invincibility. _And we can't have that, can we?_

"It did," she insists quietly.

"Liar."

She looks affronted. "I don't lie."

He laughs, the harsh noise frightening the little guy in his lap out of his teary-eyed doze. "Just like you don't cry, right?" he challenges.

Ziva doesn't answer. Outside, it begins to rain, not mournfully but with the cheery, thunderous musicality of a summer shower.

Tony gets up and walks away before he can choke on his own misplaced resentment.

* * *

At the funeral, everyone wears black. The sun shines like there's no tomorrow, and everything reeks of ozone and salt and sweat.

Tony meets no one's eyes, just sits next to his dad in his stifling designer suit and tries not to think about his non-mother with the mermaid hair being trapped below the dirt for the rest of forever.

He'd cry, but that would require _feeling_.

He emanates Gibbs, who sits erect and quiet-faced and _so damn detached _ three rows up, and remains motionless when his dad hesitantly scoots a bit closer and squeezes his shoulder.

Senior smells of aftershave and toothpaste and sweat, but not alcohol.

Tony might even feel some form of affection towards the man if he wasn't entirely frozen by Gibbs' blue eyes.

* * *

Fall is as fiery red as Jenny's hair, and the guidance counselor's talking about investments for the future.

Tony's sixteen, and he wonders what the hell that's supposed to mean.

* * *

_From: Abby_

_if it's any solace, we're not getting split up. at least not now. your dad must've paid an arm and a leg for all the medical bills._

/

Tony wonders if it's possibly for a person to feel this much resentment without beginning to rot from the outside in.

He doesn't respond.

* * *

He goes out with a couple girls, uses them, dumps them. He keeps his bedroom windows locked tight.

Maybe Ziva's right and Tony's not really a bad person, but he's doing everything in his power to change that, because if he's not the bad guy, then who is?

There has to be someone to _blame_

* * *

One night Jeanne texts him. Just a simple '_hey_.'

He decides it's best to delete her number, because he may be a bad person, but he's not- he can't-

There are degrees of evilness, he decides, and even he hasn't yet warped that much. Yet.

* * *

Winter comes.

Tony tries getting spectacularly drunk. Just once. Just to see how it feels. Just to see how it feels to feel... nothing.

Senior finds him before he's managed to muster the will to even crack the first bottle.

He wonders if he should feel guilty or apprehensive, but Senior simply replaces the bottles in the liquor cabinet and says, "Don't."

So Tony doesn't.

* * *

To: Ziva

if i say i miss you guys, will that make me a total girl?

**Message deleted. **

/

To: Ziva

how is gibbs dealing?

**Message deleted. **

/

To: Ziva

hey

**Message deleted.**

/

To: Ziva

if it's not my fault, then who am i supposed to blame?

**Message deleted. **

* * *

He can't. He just...

He can't, okay?

* * *

To: Tim

how's gibbs?

/

_From: Tim_

_He's... scarily the same. _

/

To: Tim

and everyone else?

/

_From: Tim_

_They're dealing. You?_

/

To: Tim

ditto

/

_From: Tim_

_I'd say we miss you, but I know you'll just tease me_

/

To: Tim

i miss you guys too

* * *

He gets a job. He starts playing basketball. He dates a pretty girl named Wendy who's grounded and realistic and oddly likeable.

But he still wakes up with welts on his palms from where his fingernails bite into his skin.

* * *

It gets a little easier after a while.

For the longest time, he pretended the purple house didn't even exist, so it's really not that hard to resume the pretence, so long as he ignores that heavy weight of twinging grief in his gut.

He can only go on like this for so long, but really, that's okay for now.

He's found that his cavernous plans for the future tend to have a habit of blowing up spectacularly in his face. And he'd like to avoid that, if you don't mind.

* * *

He's cruising along in the fast lane, where you can whizz right by the bad memories until they're just jolts of color rushing by, then nothing but headlights dwindling into an orange nothing in his rearview mirror, when Abby calls him.

He's at a party with several girl's eyes on him, so doesn't answer. He can't. The screams never really stopped sounding, you see.

"Hi_, Tony. It's Abby. I know- I know you need your space. But we miss you. We-"_ She breaks off. "_Call me back, okay? Please? S- Susie Mae. She, um, she misses her bestest friend Arch'bald. So- so call me back. So we can- so _they_ can talk. Please." _

* * *

He calls Abby, because she's so simultaneously resolute and vulnerable that to do anything hurtful would be akin to kicking a puppy, and they go out for ice cream. She grins at him, a smudge of chocolate ice cream tipping her nose, too adorable to be for real.

It's nice. They keep it simple. They play mini golf. They make small-talk. Abby tells him about her community service projects - bowling for the Lord with elderly nuns every Sunday night - and he tells her about his latest basketball game.

Then of course Abby ruins it by saying wistfully, "I wish it could always be like this."

"Like what?" He plays dumb, but she won't drop it.

"You know. Us. Together. Happy. Me and you and Tim and Ziva. Happy."

"Yeah," he says. His voice sounds flat and kind of grumpy. "I wish."

"But, like, why," she persists, licking melted ice cream from her knuckles and looking increasingly thoughtful, "_can't_ it be?"

"It's not that simple."

"But why can't it be? We're having fun now, aren't we?"

"We _were_."

Abby looks wounded. Tony doesn't even really know what he's saying anymore.

"Until what?" Her pigtails are flying, her hands are on her hips. "Until I try to talk about something with actual depth to it? Why do you always have to over-complicate things? Why _can't_ it be as simple as friends hanging out?"

He takes a deep breath as the words garble and buzz angrily in his brain. "Are we even friends?" he finds himself asking.

Abby's eyes widen, blur with tears. Tony hastily tries to back-track.

"I mean. Like. Why do you even want me as a friend after all the crap I pulled? I couldn't even save Jenny-"

"_That_ had _nothing_ to do with you!" she exclaims, her voice high with tears and incredulity. "Jenny died, Tony, from a tumor! You didn't murder her!"

But, really, it does have to do with him. It has _everything _to do with him, because while he didn't _kill _Jenny, he certainly didn't save her.

And that was supposed to be, like, his penance. For all the crap he pulled with Jeanne and with Ziva and with Abby and _everything_. But, like, he couldn't even do that. He couldn't even save Jenny, be the hero _just that once_.

But for Abby's sake, he goes along with it. Because, yeah, he does tend to avoid communal emotional barfing, and that is some deep psychological crap to wade through over ice cream in a public park.

"Fine, then. But everything else. Abs, why can't you just accept that things don't stay the same forever? People move on! Maybe we're supposed to, too!"

Abby jumps up from the picnic bench, stamping a foot as tears of frustration blur her eyeliner. "No! That's not how it works! You're supposed to- you're supposed to- to fight it! Maybe if you actually made an effort-"

"For what?" The words tear out, and they sound mean, harsh, acidic and bitter and deliberately cruel. "For Gibbs? He didn't even acknowledge me at the funeral! For Ziva? Because she's not talking to me either. You guys don't need me, you never have-"

"We do!" She's crying now, quietly but steadily, and they're attracting glances from the soccer mom convention across the park. "And you need us! Don't you ever- don't you ever wish you could back? To when we were little? Don't-"

Truthfully? These days he's thinking he'd rather have never lived in the Victorian house at all, rather have never been exposed to that Neverland-esque magic, because now he's haunted by those ghostly summer memories and he's been warped, by the outside world and by Abby's perfect world, and everything just _aches_, of growing pains and nostalgia and hollowed-out grief.

"I wish," he says truthfully, "that things had turned out differently."

He wishes he could forget.

He gets to his feet. "C'mon. I'll drive you home."

* * *

_From: Ziva_

_What did you do to Abby to so drastically diminish her energy levels?_

/

To: Ziva

Oh, are you talking to me again?

**Message deleted. **

/

To: Ziva

decaf

* * *

The days drone by. They blur like raindrops on a windowpane and run together and evaporate until it's spring and Tony hasn't heard from anybody in months.

* * *

Senior's drinking again. More and more and more and more. It smells of it and the air tastes of it and sometimes Tony's afraid he'll get drunk, just off the density of alcohol in the air.

The guy's pretty happy, though. He's working with some super rich businessman, haggling over real estate and champagne, and making all sorts of promises of replenishing wealth and restoring the grandeur of the DiNozzo name.

Tony wishes he could believe him, but his Dad's promises are just as light and airy and quick to melt away as insubstantial, too-sweet, obnoxiously fluorescent-pink cotton candy. They make his teeth ache.

* * *

Don't get him wrong, it's not all that bad.

He really does like Wendy. He's fast becoming the star of the basketball team. He's handsome and he's funny and when he's in the midst of things, he doesn't have to think about... other things.

It's only at night in the quiet darkness, at home when Senior's laughing merrily and drunkenly, when it rains heavily and moodily, that the twinges of regret and grief escalate into a throbbing, and that's when he has to close his eyes and hold onto the nearest chair tightly until the feeling of reality beneath his fingers brings his mind back to the present.

* * *

McGee comes over one time, because sometimes Tony _does_ wonder if Abby's right - if it's all just as simple as reaching out, if the rest of the memories and the hurt can be so easily forgotten.

Well. Tony doesn't know about that, but they watch _Inception_ in silence from opposite ends of the couch, agree that Ellen Page is a goddess, eat chips tamely, and say a lame goodbye as soon as the spinning top begins to wobble.

So there goes that whole idea.

* * *

Exactly eight days before his seventeenth birthday, Wendy confronts him. She thinks he's cheating or whatever, because he's disinterested and evasive and how come he doesn't ever talk about his feelings with her or anyone or whatever.

He tells her not to be stupid. She breaks up with him.

Suddenly Tony has a reputation as a playboy. The guys clap him on the shoulder. The girls fix him with looks of mingled disgust and admiration, depending on whether or not he has already dated them.

Whatever. He neither combats nor encourages the claims, because it doesn't really matter all that much to him at all. He wonders if that means Wendy's right about him being disinterested.

Honestly? He doesn't really care either way.

* * *

He turns seventeen.

Abby sends him a card - store-bought and generic with a happy birthday message, a lot of exclamation points, and a simple 'Love, Abby' inscribed on the bottom.

His dad hands him a wad of cash tucked between the stiff cardboard folds of a birthday card emblazoned with Garfield.

Tony wonders if maybe his dad remembers that Garfield was their favorite cartoon when he was little, the one Senior would read aloud from the paper each Sunday after he'd perused the business section with a furrowed brow. Tony would always dutifully laugh along with Dad and then again, genuinely, once his father had explained what the punch line meant.

He figures it was probably just a lucky guess as he pockets the money, but he goes to the window and waves, just once, as his father backs out of the driveway anyway.

It feels kind of stupid, yeah, but then again, so is Garfield.

* * *

Ziva finds him at the bonfire behind his house that night, surrounded by smoke and stray sparks and half-drunk kids, and yanks him into the shadows of a pine tree, practically dislocating his arm in the process.

He must have a problem. He really must, because she's glaring at him and attempting to separate his arm from its socket, and yet all he can think is whether or not she was this pretty last summer.

"Happy birthday."

"Ow. Thanks for crashing the party."

She is unamused. "We need to talk."

"Now?" he whines. She yanks his arm again. He emits an unmanly squeak of pain.

"Yes."

He can feel Wendy's eyes searing the back of his head, sharp with that keen curiosity that suggested she would have made a good addition to the school newspaper team, had that not been complete social suicide. Hastily, he grabs Ziva and pulls her further into the shadows beneath the trees.

"I don't know if you've noticed, but I've got guests to attend to," he begins sarcastically. Ziva quirks an eyebrow and casually waves his words away.

"They know where the beer is. I am sure they will survive."

The disgust tinging her words is not lost on him. Tony sighs. "Okay. So talk."

"Oh, no," says Ziva, settling down comfortably in the fallen pine needles as if she is intending to stay a while, "you will be the one doing the talking here."

"About what?"

Her eyes are dark and they reflect back the orange glow of the bonfire as she regards him carefully. "I think you know."

He makes a noise of exasperation. No, he _doesn't_ know, he's not quite sober enough to puzzle it out for himself, and he doesn't freaking have _time_ for this.

"No," he says curtly, "I don't. Elaborate?"

She raises an eyebrow, grins just a little in a way that is sort of a harsher echo of the grin he has come to know and love so well, a little bit meaner. "Ooh. Big word."

He evades. Tony's good at that, on and off the basketball court. "Yeah, well, I figure any real seventeen year old should be equipped with a vocabulary of at least ten four-syllable words."

No smile this time. He doesn't know why he even bothers, honestly. "Is the word _'apology'_ a part of your vocabulary?"

He blinks. "What, so you came to my birthday party - _without _an invite or a present, might I add - to ask me to… apologize to you?"

Ziva rolls her eyes and fumbles around in the pocket of her jeans for a moment before procuring a slightly battered, folded-over envelope. "Happy birthday."

"… I was kidding, you know."

"I want you to apologize to Abby," she continues bluntly, ignoring just about everything he says or does. "You do not owe me an apology, except perhaps for your intolerable lack of grammar when you _do _deign to respond to my texts."

He grins a little at that, more relieved that she's joking again than actually laughing at the joke, but quickly sobers up. "Did Abby send you here to-"

"No."

"No?"

"No," she confirms. "But obviously you hurt her somehow, and I think that you need to do something about it before this- this stupid _thing _that you do repeats itself again."

A beat. "I do a thing?" Tony asks intelligently.

Ziva cracks a little bit of a smile at that, just the teeniest quirk of lips breaking her otherwise stony countenance. "Yes. You visit and you make us remember you and you remind us why we love you, and then you just detach yourself all over again because you are scared of being hurt, or hurting us, but really it's just like- it is like you are picking at a scab just before it heals over, and then you make it bleed all over again, and as soon as it begins to heal you pick it again, and-"

Tony interrupts, raising a finger politely. "First of all, _ew_. Second of all, I do _not_… pick at… scabs … _What?" _

And then, abruptly, she bursts into gales of laughter. "I do not- I was trying to- English is not my first language!" she protests through the laughter. And he joins in, because honestly this whole situation is so _stupid_ and because it's nice to laugh with someone again.

"Do you want to come have an awkward encounter with my ex-girlfriend and roast s'mores?" he poses finally, and Ziva cocks her head for a moment before shrugging and agreeing.

"Provided," she finishes sternly, "you come and visit tomorrow and apologize elaborately to Abby."

He promises, as long as she, in return, never tries to make another scab-related analogy _ever again_. She says soberly that she can make no such promises.

They go sit by the fire and Ziva refuses to drink anything, because she says she doesn't trust him not to have spiked it with some sort of date-rape drug, and he teases her about being a teetotaler and they burst into awkward giggles when Wendy marches over and subtly interrogates Ziva about her relationship with her ex.

So, basically, it's like the best birthday he's had since he was thirteen, even if there aren't any chocolate chip pancakes.

* * *

**No, I DON'T know where I'm going with this at all, what gave you that impression I wonder? **

**So please don't hate me for... more angst. Or for not updating. Or for just the general crappy quality of everything I write. I really need NCIS to be back on TV before I get sucked into some other fandom and never go back...  
**

**And just to clarify - the whole 'Message Deleted' thing - that was Tony deleting messages that he wanted to send, but didn't. They never reached Ziva in the first place.  
**

**Aaaand that's all I have to say of relevance. I watched AVPM the other day. Yeah. Only just got around to it. I'm such a loser lol. My Hunger Games collaboration's going pretty well. My first chapter's up. Go check it out, link's in the profile, etc. That's all I can think to say except to beg you guys for the reviews I don't deserve, because my self-esteem regarding my writing is like sub-basement right now and all the fabulousness being heaped upon me makes me feel warm and cozy and generally appreciated.  
**

**I'll try to update again soon. I promise.  
**

**Yeah. Okay. Bye.  
**

**~ Styx**


	5. Chapter 5

**Hey, my pretties! Sorry for the super long wait, but this one was not cooperative AT ALL. However, I think I whipped it into something fairly decent at last, so here you go! It's nice and long, too!**

**This was supposed to be the last chapter, wrapping it up in a nice round 5 parts, but it's just too dang long and I had to hack a piece off. That being said, the part I left out is already fairly lengthy, so hopefully the last chapter won't be too long in appearing. **

**Thanks for all your marvelously encouraging reviews. They make my life every time I receive one. Keep 'em comin' kay?**

**Disclaimer: Disclaimed.**

* * *

The next day Ziva wakes him up too early to think, and she's wearing his sweatshirt that she's stolen from his closet, and before he can even gather enough energy to yell at her about invasion of privacy, he sees a small, ragged stuffed bear sitting at the foot of his bed.

She doesn't say anything about it, just raises her eyebrows in defiance and tells him to get up, to do it right this second or she'll pickle his innards.

Sometimes he has a hard time reconciling her hard, beautiful shell with whoever the girl inside is, the one who despised wearing shoes and the one who understands the significance of a stuffed bear hidden behind a pile of extra blankets in the back of his closet.

"We are going to go buy donuts and bribe people to be your friends again," she explains, smiling brightly. "And this time you are not going to retreat and leave them alone again."

He wonders if it's selfish that he wants to argue that she and Tim and Abby aren't ever as alone as he is, because they have each other and they have Gibbs and they have peeling porch swings to propel with swinging bare feet and pine needle forests and a red front door that squeaks and never quite closes properly.

It probably is. He's a very selfish person.

But he does insist on paying for the donuts and even buys Ziva a coffee - though that _is_ a bit selfish because he knows she secretly despises coffee and is just too stubborn to ever admit it, and her facial expressions of repressed disgust and determination are just precious - so that's something, right?

* * *

Abby is unimpressed. "I don't even like donuts," she says.

McGee makes a choked noise of protest through a mouthful of glazed chocolate perfection, and Abby rolls her eyes before conceding, "Well, I don't like them _much_."

"I like them," says a thin, bespectacled preteen eagerly. There's custard cream on the left lens of his circular glasses, and it takes Tony a long moment to place him.

Holy Crap.

This gawky boy, who's nearly as tall as Tony, is the little, bed-wetting Jimmy Palmer of old.

It makes Tony almost sad, to think that this kid's grown up in his absence, and yet Tony's still the same (lonely, vaguely selfish) person who left those years ago.

But he smiles anyway, hands Palmer another donut - because, seriously, the kid needs to put some meat on his bones before he starts to resemble an anorexic giraffe any more than he already does - and slides the box towards Abby.

"You know you want one," he wheedles, grinning wide.

Ziva rolls her eyes and hands Tony a napkin. "Wipe your face before you start trying to be charming."

Abby walks away before he's managed to remove all the chocolate from his mouth.

Apparently he doesn't succeed in completely hiding his crestfallen face behind the chocolate-smudged napkin all that well, because Ziva takes his hand beneath the table and McGee quietly says that he's gotten his hands on the newest Madden game, and that Tony can even have the first pick of teams.

He loses spectacularly, and McGee cackles maniacally all the while. Ziva is continuously vocal with her criticism, though she understands nothing of either real football or video games, and Palmer just sits there grinning goofily and eating donut crumbs from the now-empty box.

After a while, he doesn't even have to make an effort to smile, even when Abby slinks quietly down the stairs and curls up in the worn leather armchair that Jenny cried in as she watched _Titanic_ with Gibbs, the night when Tony and Ziva hid behind the couch and pretended they weren't crying along with her.

* * *

"Was that so bad?" Ziva demands, crossing her arms like she knows everything, when she walks Tony out to the car that night.

He doesn't know how to answer, because it was almost torturous, truthfully, to sit in the living room and laugh and pretend they hadn't all sat there on the couch in silent shock only a couple months ago. Everything is heavy, saturated with memories that, good or bad, hurt all the same.

But it almost feels good, the emotional wreckage of it all, because it reminds him of penance. And Abby even smiled a couple times... Granted, she was mostly just glorying in his crushing loss to McGamer, but... still.

"Can I have my sweatshirt back?" he asks instead.

Ziva smiles wickedly and shoves her hands into the sweatshirt pocket with an air of casual, arrogant defiance. "Come and get it," she says, and takes off.

He doesn't have to try to smile this time as he chases her, barefoot and recklessly beautiful, down the street where they played soccer and stubbed toes and sprained ankles and narrowly avoided being struck by the neighborhood cars.

It's the most natural, raw, exhilarated emotion he's felt all day, and he relishes in it even as loose gravel sprays up around his ankles and he nearly kills himself in that same pothole that was the perpetual enemy of his childhood ankles.

He laughs under the blotted, circular glow of the streetlamps, and for a while it all goes away.

* * *

"You have to start thinking about the future," says Senior. He looks and sounds rather disinterested, with glasses perched on the tip of his nose and sheaves of paper fanning out like monochromatic peacock plumes across the rich, polished wood of his desk, but his gaze is intense when he finally looks up long enough to pin Tony with it.

"You play basketball, right?"

Tony blinks, breaths out quietly through his mouth, and wonders why he's even the slightest bit surprised. "Um. Yeah."

"Are you any good?" Senior inquires, annotating something with an inky blue pen and an air of idle curiosity.

He shrugs one shoulder lopsidedly. "Yeah."

Actually, the coach says he's the best he's seen in a long time. The scouts, in the bleachers with their clipboards, seem to concur, if the way they raise their eyebrows in quiet acknowledgment is anything to judge by.

He wants to tell Senior that, throw it in his face and see if the old man even cares enough to be impressed, but the thing is, he really is good at basketball.

It's one of the only things he _knows_ he's good at, and truthfully, he doesn't need other people's hollow admiration to reaffirm it.

So he just half-shrugs and sits back in his seat and waits for Senior to make another feeble attempt at portraying a caring parent.

"Your mother and I put away some money for you. Before."

Tony chokes, just a little on the air. He doesn't really remember his mother. He didn't even know she was dead for the entire week following her death, when his father was continuously drunk and in debt and Tony just sat in the corner of the couch and watched cartoons with the volume turned way down low, so as not to shatter the fragile nerves that were stretched so taut that they quivered.

It still hurts a little, though. He thinks, with a pang that pricks of guilt, of Jenny. And all along there was more money he could have given. To his real mother, the one whose death he has been infinitely, painfully aware of every waking moment of the day.

"And?" he says finally. His voice sounds gruff and unfamiliar.

Senior shrugs. "So are you planning on going to college?"

The future is a bizarre thing to Tony, who's still got his consciousness caught painfully in the past like a bone-cracking bear trap. He shrugs again, wonders if he's developing a nervous tick.

"Well," Senior says finally, scribbling randomly and futilely in the margin with his brow furrowed before retrieving a new, working pen, "it's here if you want it."

Tony wonders if this is the part where he's supposed to say thank you.

* * *

Arch'bald continues to sit limply at the foot of Tony's bed. His button eyes have lost their luster, and he seems very much smaller than remembered.

Tony takes to sleeping with his legs angled to avoid nudging the bear off the bed in his sleep. Because then his conscious would nudge him into retrieving the bear, and that would involve contact with the sacred relic.

He's afraid it might crumble to dust and stray bits of stitching. He's afraid it might still smell like the detergent that Jenny used to wash his sheets with.

He's just. Afraid. Or something.

* * *

But apparently facing your fears is important, so he goes back to the house on a Friday afternoon. It's so hot that there are hazy walls of transparent heat hanging in the air like bed sheets on a clothesline.

Tony and Palmer team up against everyone in an epic, chaotic, frighteningly intense water war. They hide in the stream beneath the wooden footbridge, toes stinging with cold, clothes sticking to them with sweat, waiting.

"I remember you, you know," says Jimmy abruptly. He's poking at a frog/toad/thing with a stick, making it pee and hop all over the place.

"Stay on topic, Black Lung," Tony answers shortly. Maybe not all the severity in his voice is feigned, but the whole point of engaging in raucous physical activity was to avoid conversations like this.

"I remember I thought you guys were the coolest people in the world," Jimmy muses. "I guess you were probably only like my age, but you always seemed so cool and mature, because you could walk into town... Oh, and you could watch the Star Wars movies that were rated PG-13."

Tony laughs a little at that. His feet ache from the inside out with cold. He feels kind of numb.

"You didn't turn out so bad after all, Palmer," he says approvingly.

Jimmy turns red. His glasses are lopsided, speckled with water droplets from the last time Ziva, Tim, and Abby tracked them down.

"Neither did you," he offers with all the awkward civility of one stranger exchanging formalities with another. Tony winces and thanks God that Ziva chooses that minute to launch another of her concerningly well-orchestrated guerrilla hit-and-run tactics.

He grabs her bare ankle when she runs across the splintery slats of the footbridge and pulls her into the stream. She's laughing, flat on her back in the knee-deep water, and he pins her down as he yells to Palmer to run, Black Lung, run!

Palmer's disqualified like six seconds later under the combined forces of Abby, McGee, and this frighteningly aggressive toddler in Buzz Lightyear trunks. Black Lung goes down.

They lose miserably, and Tony has to treat everyone else to ice cream. His teeth hurt from all the times he had to grit them over the length of the day, but then again that could just be the brain freeze.

It was a good day, he thinks, when he weighs it all over that night. He texts Ziva and tells her so, and her responding smiley-face emoticon is supremely smug.

* * *

"-besides, you practically _are_ James Bond, so this'll be like watching home movies for you anyway!"

Ziva groans again, but Tony's pretty sure there's a smile caught somewhere in the crook of her mouth, so he just yanks her along all the more energetically.

They stop short at the entrance to the darkened living room, and Tony doesn't dare look at Ziva as Dad glances up from the glass of amber liquid that he's nursing.

"Hey, Junior. Hey... "

"Ziva," she supplies, probably smiling charmingly. Tony won't look at her to confirm this. "I am a friend of Tony's from-"

"I remember you," Senior interrupts, waving the hand that isn't holding the delicate glass, frosted with condensation. "Didn't know you two were still in touch."

"We are," says Tony shortly, and abruptly realizes he's still holding Ziva's wrist. He wonders if letting go now would make him look guilty.

Senior raises his eyebrows. "Looks that way."

Tony lets go of the slim bones of her wrist guiltily. "Come on, Ziva. We can watch movies later-"

"No, no," his father says genially, "go right ahead. I'm not stopping you. In fact, it's been quite a while since I indulged in some Connery."

He looks at her then. He's afraid she's going to be looking at him with pity, or looking at Dad with disgust, but instead she's smiling her bizarrely, misleadingly charming smile. Her hand fumbles out and encircles his own wrist (they don't hold hands because there's something too intimate and confining about that) and then he's being yanked toward the couch as she says:

"Perhaps you can succeed where your son has failed, Mr. DiNozzo, and explain the logic behind this movie series. The continuity, even between actors, is appalling-"

Senior laughs. "Call me Tony."

Tony - Junior, that is - thinks he's going to be sick

He only takes solace in the fact that Ziva persists in addressing Dad as 'Mr. DiNozzo.'

She spends the entire movie pointing out technical inaccuracies of weaponry, explosives, bureaucracy. He spends the greater portion of the movie alternating between exasperation with Senior and exasperation with her.

He spends the other portion of the movie gauging the distance between his knee and hers and watching her lips twitch upwards every time somebody dies on screen.

* * *

"She's a keeper," says Senior, knocking back the remnants of his Scotch the moment the door has closed behind Ziva. Tony ignores him stonily and turns away before allowing himself to smile with fond exasperation at the squealing of tires and brakes that accompanies Ziva's departure from the driveway.

* * *

He comes back on a Thursday, biting his lip at the abandoned lacrosse stick that's lying across the chipped white wood of the porch swing. It looks so small, cheap and mostly plastic and more suited to bludgeoning people's heads than actually playing lacrosse, and Tony hasn't played lacrosse in a good couple years now anyway.

He picks it up as he steps back from the red-painted door and listens to the familiar chime of the doorbell sound inside. Sure enough, lettered at the end of the faux-metal shaft is his name in permanent marker penmanship that is actually a good deal neater than his handwriting these days.

A little kid - since when is ten young anyway? - opens the door and regards him with openly curious, somewhat frightened eyes. "That's mine," he says after a second of staring, and points.

Tony puts the stick down gently.

"Just admiring it," he soothes, and remembers when he was the hotshot preteen with the sports gear and Ziva was the angry-eyed intruder who everyone was irrationally suspicious of. "Is Gibbs home?"

The kid squints. "Yeah, but he's in a bad mood."

"I'm good at cheering people up," Tony lies through smilingly gritted teeth, and lightly tosses the boy the weighted lacrosse ball before brushing past him and into the familiar household.

"Gibbs!" yells miniature-Tony, speeding past his older counterpart and down the hallway in socked feet that are far from clean. Tony wonders absentmindedly who does the laundry nowadays, and if the detergent's still scented with that lilac that Jenny was so very partial to. "There's a man here to see you!"

Tony almost looks over his shoulder to see who else has come to the door seeking an audience with 'the Boss.' Then he realizes that _he's_ 'the man' being referred to, and wonders when the hell that happened, particularly as he actually always feels far less mature and self-assured, a great deal more reckless, the moment he sets foot on the brightly chalked driveway behind the picket fence.

"_You're_ not a man," remarks Abby, crinkling her nose and leaning against the rail of the landing as she comes to a halt halfway through her descent of the stairs. "You're Tony."

He grins hesitantly. "Well spotted."

"No one invited you here," she says flatly. The smile withers and sinks like a deflated balloon.

"I did," says Gibbs' voice sharply. Tony turns and there he is, in all his blue-eyed glory, in a familiar sweatshirt frosted in something that looks like sawdust. Gibbs crooks a half-smile at him. "Waiting for your personal escort, DiNozzo?"

Abby says nothing, but her hand sort of creeps up off the polished wood of the banister in a lame attempt at a wave before her fingers fist and disappear into the pocket of her jeans like a host of rebuked children.

Tony follows Gibbs down the tiled hall and is surprised when the man swings an unexpected right and jogs casually down the wooden stairs to the dimly lit recesses of the basement that Tony had always secretly harbored a tremulous terror of.

"I've relocated my office," he says simply, turning at the bottom of the stairs to address Tony, still standing uncertainly in the doorframe. "Watch your step and don't touch anything sharp."

Tony salutes. He wonders if the succession of Christmas photos that still hang slightly lopsided in their neat white frames on the walls of the always-cluttered office Jenny and Gibbs had shared had something to do with this relocation.

Jenny had refused to have the photos professionally backed, instead holing herself away in an upstairs bedroom with the greater contents of several craft stores for a good few days. The end result had been pleasantly haphazard, and Tony remembers taking great relish in helping nail the frames to the wall with a real live hammer.

"How're things?" he asks at last, the safest of the thousands of questions and recollections and damned emotions that rise to the surface like bubbles in a glass of fine champagne.

(Only the son of an alcoholic could come up with just about every booze-related metaphor in the nonexistent book.)

Gibbs moves towards the skeleton frame of something wooden and oblong. It's dusty down here, and the light that creeps in through the tiny, slatted windows filters gold through the airborne sawdust.

"Fine." A beat. "How're things for you?"

Tony considers as he takes a seat at the bottom of the stairs. "Fine," he settles for, lying to Gibbs just as smoothly as the man had lied to him.

Gibbs takes up something that Tony thinks might be sandpaper and begins to scrub at the bone-white wood in an oddly graceful back-and-forth motion. Tony finds himself breathing in time with the scratchy rhythm, up and down, in and out, and thinks he might understand this comfortable seclusion's appeal.

"Really."

"Yes," he lies.

Gibbs nods, lips moving contemplatively, then stops his movements abruptly as he turns to look at Tony. "Then what the hell are you doing here, DiNozzo?"

Tony hesitates, breathing in. "I was just wondering about how things are going here… financially."

Gibbs turns back to his over-sized popsicle stick concoction. "Fine," he says shortly. It's probably a lie.

"Because," Tony pushes bravely forward, "my dad said something the other day about some money that my- my mom put away for me before… you know. So I was thinking, if I could do anything to make things easier around here-"

"Why?"

He sits up a little straighter, eyeing Gibbs' form through the haze of sawdust and dying light bulbs. The older man doesn't look at him, keeps scraping up and down.

"What?"

"I said," says Gibbs bluntly, "why the hell would you do that?"

Tony looks at the sawdust caught in the fraying, yellow-grayed strands of his untied shoelaces. He doesn't know why. He's more than a little taken aback.

But he shrugs and plays it light. "I don't know, I guess I just wanted to help out around the house-"

"You don't live here," says Gibbs flatly.

Tony blinks. His mouth opens, closes. He accidently inhales a lungful of sawdust and emits something between a cough, a sneeze, and a death rattle.

"Yeah. I got that, funnily enough," he retorts after he's recovered.

"You haven't lived here since you were, what, twelve?" he continues.

Tony can't breathe again. "Thirteen," he manages.

"Right," agrees Gibbs, like it doesn't actually matter. His arms keep moving, up and down, wearing away at the wood and clouding the air. "You don't owe us anything."

"I'm not-"

"And if you did, you know what I'd tell you to do?"

Tony, numb, offers no reply.

"I'd tell you to go to college and be productive and-" Gibbs doesn't turn, doesn't look, keeps moving, and Tony can only stare "-move on already. You got that, DiNozzo?"

The sandpaper's scraping, scraping, scraping. Tony bolts to his feet, up the stairs, out the door.

* * *

Abby's on the front porch swing, barefoot, bobbing her head along to heavy metal music so loud that Tony can hear it even through the headphones snaking out from beneath her slim black twin braids.

She looks up when he bolts out the front door like a madman, opens her mouth like maybe she's considering saying something.

The words burst forth, harsh and bitter like a festering wound weeping poison. "Don't worry. I'm leaving."

She looks startled underneath her heavy black bangs.

Tony leaves.

* * *

Senior's so drunk that he doesn't even register when the front door slams, just twitches a little in his leather desk chair so that the amber liquid in his crystal decanter ripples.

Tony tears up the stairs and slams that door, too, trying to break the silence with sheer decibels.

He doesn't even really know what happens next.

* * *

He just knows that he's filled out that scholarship application Coach handed him last week with a wink, and that somewhere in the midst of it he must have cried a little, because there's salt on his lips when Ziva's hand finds his shoulder.

He turns in his swiveling office chair, starts so suddenly that he even catches Ziva off-guard. Her hand jumps off him, palm turning upwards passively.

"Abby was worried about you."

"What," he says, savagely, "did I hurt her precious feelings again?"

"Don't make me slap you," she says very quietly, and reaches out to touch the remnants of teardrops on his cheek in a motion that is anything but a smack.

He stands abruptly, backs away, turns to face her restlessly. "Go away."

She crosses her arms. Over the leather back of the chair, which is still slowly revolving from his abrupt departure from its confines, Ziva glares back at him. "No."

Tony makes a noise of frustration in the back of his throat. "I don't want you here right now."

Ziva shrugs. "Then we will go somewhere else." She uses her ninja skillz and has his wrist in the grip of her steely, slender fingers in an instant. "Come."

"Where are we going?" he inquires, begrudgingly curious. He finds it very hard to be whole-heartedly angry at her when her fingertips are at his pulse point and there's a scrap of a leaf caught in her riotous, summer-afternoon curls.

She smiles. "We're going to run away."

* * *

But of course it turns out that Ziva isn't talking about legitimate, cool running away with, like, sticks slung over shoulders, wielding all their worldly possessions in handily tied bandanas.

She just makes him climb out the window - because apparently doors are overrated or something - and then leads him back to her beat-up car and flushes slightly when she starts the car and the _Sound of Music _soundtrack begins to play through the speakers.

He almost balks when he recognizes the route they're following, but then she pulls off the road a good few blocks away from the purple house, onto a gravelly shoulder fringing the spruce woods.

Ziva takes his wrist again, toeing off her shoes, once he's rounded the front of the car to stand beside her and regard the woods. Then, humming _Edelweiss_, she yanks him into the stubbly, half-dead grass.

He follows because the leaf is still in her hair. His shoes get lost somewhere along the way as well.

* * *

They end up in the midst of the hydrangea. It's not a surprise, but there's still a jolt of something in his chest. He can smell the other-worldly perfection that is Gibbs' barbecue, and it makes him feel a little sick.

The sky grows dark as they watch, velvety blue-black, pricked with needle-point stars, through the clouds of yellow petals. There are more leaves in Ziva's hair now, and Tony's cologne is attracting mosquitoes like it's nothing more than sugar-water.

"Ohio State is a good athletics school, yes?" she asks abruptly, pillowing her curly head with folded arms. He looks at her, and then has to look away.

"Yeah. How-"

"I read the application over your shoulder," she reveals modestly.

Tony smiles at that. "You're devious, you know that?"

It's too dark to be sure, but she might have blushed. He loves her all the more for it as his eyes watch the cut-outs of night sky through the sunshiny petals that arch overhead. There's a branch digging into his back, but he's afraid to move.

"Do you think you will be happy there?" she wants to know.

Tony's not always quite sure what that feels like anymore. He shrugs. "Probably."

She nods, seemingly satisfied. "Good."

He's a little amused at her satisfaction. He tilts his chin back to look at her, the angles of her face highlighted and pronounced in the darkness. "That's alright with you, then?" he jokes.

"I think it has been-" she considers "-a very long time since you were happy, Tony, and _that _is certainly not alright with me."

"I'm… happy," he protests lamely. He can't even summon the energy to be convincing.

"Gibbs just wants you to be happy," she says seriously. "I believe that that was why he was trying to help you separate yourself from the past when he told you to leave today."

That sort of makes sense, in a dull, hollowly aching sort of way that settles in his chest like a stone.

"But," Tony protests eventually, "that's really stupid."

He shifts, slumping into an awkwardly upright position and shaking loose a snowstorm of yellow petals. One lands on Ziva's pursed lips. She blows it back upwards, then snatches it out of the air with her disarming reflexes.

He continues, "I was way happier here, with you guys, than I _ever_ have been since. How would leaving that behind make me happy?"

Ziva takes his hand and idly begins to paint the skin of his palm yellow with her fallen petal, a kiss by proxy.

"I believe," she says thoughtfully, "that that is what growing up is about. You find a different sort of happy."

It's easy to be philosophical in the quiet, imperfect serenity of nature. Tony thinks about his father and how he finds faux-happy in a bottle, because he lost the real thing. Or maybe because he never went out looking for it in the first place.

"What about you?" he asks. It's probably incredibly intrusive, and he's not even quite sure what he's questioning in the first place, but Ziva takes a minute to think about it.

"I have been grown up for quite some time now," she says solemnly, smiling with a trace of sarcasm to mask the utmost truth of her statement.

Tony looks at her for a minute, wondering, but doesn't voice the question. He feels for the first time like there'll be other days, other quiet nights, to delve. It's a peaceful sort of feeling.

The crick in his neck that seems to be attempting to decapitate him when he tries to sit up the next morning does nothing to lessen the easy sense of it.

* * *

He doesn't knock before he enters Dad's office and immediately regrets it.

Renee Benoit is sitting in the fine leather chair opposite Senior. He turns and smiles at Tony as the door bangs open.

"Anthony. It has been a long time."

Tony tries not to think about pink-polished fingernails and love songs printed in dark, tailed little eighth notes. He smiles, mirroring the pointed one Senior directs his way.

"Good to see you, Mr. Benoit. Sorry to interrupt. Dad, I'll- um, can we talk later?"

Senior is still grinning genially. There are two glasses of expensive wine sitting upon the tablecloth of official-looking white documents. Tony guesses the emptied one belongs to his father.

"'Course, Junior. Everything okay?"

Tony tries to smile back, but only manages a grimace. Already the adrenaline-fueled impulse that drove him into action is fading, and he regrets ever entering the office to begin with.

"Yeah, fine. It's not important anyway. Nice seeing you, Mr. Benoit," he lies once, twice, and again.

The man smiles back, reptilian and lazily menacing. "Likewise, Anthony."

* * *

They never end up talking - Tony and Senior, that is - because the sheer déjà vu of the house sends Tony dashing for his car, and by the time he returns, Senior is merrily drunk and toasting the nonexistent occupants of the house around him in celebration over another load of money made.

He was probably a lost cause anyway, but Tony always sort of wonders at the back of his mind if his words would have had an impact, had such a conversation actually taken place.

* * *

Tony and Ziva watch every Bond movie made over the length of the summer. At her insistence, they also watch _The Sound of Music_, _My Fair Lady_, and _Oklahoma_.

They watch _Inception_ three times and still cannot manage to agree on the spinning totem at the end of the movie. Tony, to his horror, accidentally learns all the words to _Sixteen Going on Seventeen._

They never once watch _Titanic_. They don't talk about it.

* * *

The first time Tony beats McGee at a video game, he accidentally punches Palmer - the Luigi to his Mario - in the face.

Palmer takes it like a man and doesn't even bleed, but Tony feels sort of awful and insists on driving his partner home all the same.

McGee looks very sour in the passenger seat.

"You're never going to let me live this down, are you?"

Tony grins. "Not a chance, McSour Puss. We are the champions, right, Black Lung?"

Palmer pumps a fist in the air. The other hand is holding a package of frozen peas to his nose. His glasses hand lopsidedly above.

"You beat me at _Mario Cart_!" Tim protests.

"Twice in a row," Tony counters, and will listen to reason no more.

He drops them off at the foot of the driveway, punching Palmer lightly on the shoulder in apology as he hops out of the back seat, then drives away before someone can open the front door.

He hasn't entered the purple house since Gibbs as good as kicked him out. He doesn't plan to.

* * *

Senior gets it into his head that he's not a very good parent.

This is largely due to his new dabblings in the world of bourbon, which seems to turn him into an introspective drunk. This is as opposed to wine, which makes him over-celebratory, or beer, which makes him cranky the next morning, or certain varieties of whiskey, which make him think that it is somehow socially acceptable to crack puns, or-

Well, the list goes on.

The point is that Senior decides he's a bad parent, and this thought perturbs him so much that he nearly shatters a decanter of fine bourbon when he gets to his feet.

Tony follows him unwillingly, mostly to ensure the man doesn't fall or vomit on any of his stuff, and complains, "Dad, I'm supposed to meet McGee-"

Senior turns to face him, hand on the doorknob. "Have you ever even seen your mother's grave?" he inquires soberly.

Tony fumbles, thinking of red hair and tiger lilies on a cherry wood coffin for an instant. "Not for a while," he admits.

He's pretty sure he visited the burial site once before he moved into the purple house, but mostly he just remembers that Dad smelled funny and his hands shook so bad that afterwards he had to buy Tony a second ice cream cone, 'cause he dropped the first as he handed it over.

Senior shakes his head. "I've failed you as a parent. I've failed your mother."

Tony doesn't deny any claims, just pats his father rather lamely on the shoulder before guiding him back towards his study. "I'll go fix you a Defibrillator," he proposes.

Senior's passed out before Tony's even unearthed the Tabasco sauce. They never bring up the subject again.

* * *

Ziva's nails are unpainted, but she plays the piano nearly as well as Jeanne did.

Tony gets bored quickly, though, because Ziva only knows random classical pieces with no lyrics with which he can substitute dirty words.

They play chopsticks, elbows brushing, until Senior yells something inarticulately about their repetitious tinkering making his head explode.

Tony's smile drops, but afterwards he does a marvelous impression of his father's walrus-like bellowing which nearly gets them kicked out of IHOP. This is quite an accomplishment indeed, and Ziva kicks his shins under the table, pretending she's not smiling down at her strawberry-laden pancakes. Their ankles tangle.

The smile comes back.

* * *

Summer ends with a last hurrah, in which Tony and McGee debate the pronunciation, as well as the validity, of the word _'hurrah'_ and Abby unwillingly comes along.

They drive McGee's car, which he bought for himself with the money made working at a comic book store, for some reason. He has a glove compartment full to the brim with weird science fiction books on tape, but not a single cd with, like, music on it... Except for one of Abby's mix tapes. Which doesn't qualify as music.

They listen to a recording of _The Hobbit_ on the way down. McGee becomes positively irate when Tony continually throws in geeky cultural references of varied origins.

Abby laughs when McGee's ears go red. She pats his head and the rest of his face flushes even darker.

* * *

Abby ignores Tony the entirety of the day, instead making it a point to simply drown McGee in her over-dramatized affections. The geeky teen does not seem to know how to receive these attentions, which Tony does not doubt he has long desired.

"I do not know if McGee is sunburned or simply blushing," Ziva observes, tracing shapes in the dunes, "again."

"Probably both," surmises Tony. He watches as Abby dances about through knee-high waves, weirdly feminine and curvy in a black dotted tankini, pigtails dramatically askew.

He's trying not to look at Ziva, because she's wearing a bikini. That's so typically atypical of her - to have established herself as a pronounced tomboy and then pull of a t-shirt advertising Mixed Martial Arts to reveal a sinfully small bathing suit.

He's been surreptitiously snapping pictures of her with his cell phone all day as she sprawls beside him, lazily reading a book in the heated dunes with her bare feet in the air.

He likes the book far less than the bikini. "You're so boring," he laments. "Don't you want to have fun?"

She turns a page pointedly. "I _am_ having fun."

He is aghast. "Reading?"

Ziva ignores his question, peeking up under her eyelashes. He forces himself to meet her eyes and not stare at the faintest of tan lines crossing her back. "Are _you_ having fun?"

"I'd have more fun if you'd come swim with me," he grumbles.

She waits.

"Yeah," Tony amends. "I am."

Ziva nods, turns a page, absent-mindedly tucks a curl behind her ear. The sun is going down. Above the hiss of the surf, Tony can hear Abby shrieking with laughter as she chases McGee with what looks to be a real live jellyfish.

He finds it takes a lot less effort now, to grin when Abby turns to wave the jellyfish triumphantly at him, to nudge Tim in the ribs teasingly and ask if Bilbo Baggins is the one who ends up being Luke's father.

The suckish parts are still there, of course. For example, Abby's icy silent treatment. Gibbs. Jenny. The fact that McGee's talking about watching a movie when they "get home" and Tony knows he'll drop them off at the foot of a chalked-up mosaic of a driveway, then drive away.

"Happy?" inquires Ziva without looking up.

He looks at the strip of pale gold skin on the expanse of deeper bronze and grins, squinting in the dying sun as Abby and Tim shout hoarsely over the surf. "Happy," he confirms.

They bump fists.

* * *

**Next chapter should hopefully be up before the end of the world. *fingers crossed***

**Please don't favorite or follow without leaving a review! Tell me what you liked and what you didn't! I particularly love hearing favorite lines or sections! Love to all my reviewers :)**

**Lastly, I know a lot of people have asked to hear more about our darling Ziva's AU backstory, and while this story focuses primarily on Tony, if I get enough persuasive reviews (hint, hint :D) I might be willing to expand on Ms. David in a lengthy one-shot! I've already got some ideas in mind, but I need encouragement if anyone wants to see it fleshed out any further! **

**Love you all times infinity ~ Styx**


	6. Chapter 6

**Dear Anybody Who's Still Reading This Trainwreck, **

***attempts casualty* So how 'bout last night's episode, eh? Pretty intense, eh? *breaks down into a quivering ball of sniffly-snorts and sort of rocks back and forth on the ground for a while* Well, it seemed to shock me right out of my writer's block (which is a credit to its intensity, ohmylord) and I banged the rest of this out last night in a fit of stress-writing to stop myself from THINKING too much. So here it is, at last.  
**

**Amyway, this is the end. I'm sorry it took so long, but I'm fairly satisfied with it, albeit immensely insecure. So please read, enjoy, and review. I know it sounds cheesy, but this story has literally been a journey for me, and so special thanks to everybody who's stuck through it all with me as I procrastinated and rewrote and lamented this bizarre writing style I've adopted. Special thanks to Anonymous033, who made an exception to her no-AU rules and read this for me, and who I've neglected atrociously. **

**Anyway, without further ado...**

**Disclaimer: Disclaimed.**

* * *

It hits Tony on the head one day, like _bam_, that he's sort of madly in love with Ziva. Like, a lot.

He's laying on the floor of his bedroom and she's sitting cross-legged on his bed and coloring in her toenails with a turquoise permanent marker, and he's trying to explain to her what exactly "that's what she said" means.

She's bewildered and he's not entirely convinced that she's not just feigning ignorance to watch him squirm, and then all of a sudden it sort of hits him that he wants to kiss her.

Not because he's emotionally damaged and not (just) because he's physically attracted to her and not because sometimes he's desperately lonely, but because she's coloring her toenails with a marker and because she doesn't understand why "_that's what she said_" is an innuendo and because she's laughing at his embarrassment and she's _gorgeous_ when she laughs.

He doesn't kiss her, though.

He doesn't want to ruin it. Mostly, he just knows he doesn't deserve to kiss her, not after... everything.

He just takes up a purple marker and starts drawing awkward flowers on her toenails that sort of look like ameba, grinning wider when she leans over to touch up her big toe and her curls fall in his face.

Oh, god, he's screwed.

* * *

From: McGee (5:16)

ZIVA FOUND THE BIKINI PICTURES YOU SENT ME SHE HAS A PAPERCLIP  
SEND HELP

* * *

A couple weeks into October, and everyone's talking about college, and Tony says nothing.

It's funny, 'cause when he was eight, a year seemed like an eternity, and here he is, almost eighteen, and the world is suddenly rushing at him headlong and it feels like only yesterday he was learning how to properly tie his shoes.

Senior year goes fast, says every old person ever, cherish it.

Time is such a bizarre thing, though, and Tony finds himself living for the golden snippets of adrenaline-quickened seconds where he's laughing with McGee or driving too fast or accidentally holding hands with Ziva.

Gibbs apparently tried to tell him, in probably the harshest, most roundabout terms ever, that Tony won't ever be able to move forward unless he turns his back to the past.

But if moving on entails forgetting Tim's awkward sense of humor and Abby's blindly good-hearted passion for the world, if moving on means ignoring the way his entire nervous system thrums when Ziva rests her head on his shoulder, then Tony thinks he could be content with growing old in the blue-painted bedroom of his father's house, never going anywhere at all.

Content, not happy, because the memories make something beneath his ribcage ache swollenly in a sort of painful reminiscence. Content, but there would be happiness, too, in those instances of vibrancy and laughter and thoughtless adrenaline.

It's all so much more complicated - guilty happiness and fears of the future and fears of the past - than it was when he was five and Abby offered him her bear and her friendship with a little hand tipped in dirty, sloppily-painted fingernails.

Still, he can't bring himself to regret taking that worn bear and that dirty little hand.

* * *

"What are you going to do with your life?" asks Tony one dismal, rainy afternoon in November as he and Ziva laze in warm, comfortable sloth on the couch downstairs.

He means the question to be ironic, but it doesn't come out sounding that way and Ziva sits up straight for a moment in contemplation.

"I do not know," she says after a minute, slumping once more, visibly troubled.

He hums his agreement and idly begins attempting to braid Ziva's hair, which results in some truly baffling snarls. "Join the club."

She persists in looking perturbed though, so much so that she thankfully does not even notice the entanglement of hair he has bestowed upon her, and Tony feels a little bad for her. He nudges her with his elbow.

"C'mon, it's not a big deal. Lots of people don't know until they graduate college. What'd you want to be when you grew up when you were little?"

Ziva bites her lip and says nothing.

"Let me guess," says Tony, joking because he doesn't like the look in her eyes, "a knife-thrower at the circus? Or, no, a dentist?"

"A soldier," interrupts Ziva, slumped against him with her head turned pointedly away.

He pauses. "Seriously?"

"It was not an irregular occupation," says Ziva haughtily, "in Israel. My father encouraged the notion."

"Well," Tony says finally, "I wanted to be a garbage man until, like, last year. So obviously people change and stuff. What do you think you'd like to do now?"

Ziva stays silent, thumbing the mute button on the television remote and composedly turning her attention to a rerun of Jeopardy.

Tony watches her from the corner of his eye, thinking. She's so small and real and human, with her curly head casually leaning on his bicep and her mouth set firmly, and he doesn't like to think of her as a little girl almost as much as he doesn't like to think of her as a hardened soldier.

He pats her lamely on the head and resumes braiding/mutilating her hair.

* * *

"Hi, Tony, it's me. Tim, that is. Tim McGee. Um, listen, I was wondering - and it's totally okay if you can't make it, I mean, it's not like it's important, but it'd mean a lot if you _could_ come... Whoa, I'm rambling. Uh. Sorry. This is why I usually just text people, um, phones make me really nervous...

"Anyway, uh, I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before, but my dad... He's not dead, by the way, I don't know if I've ever mentioned him to you, but he's not dead or anything, he's just... sick, so um I live with you guys and not with him... And by you guys I mean, Abby and Ziva and Gibbs, since you... I mean, since I don't live with _you_ specifically... Anymore, anyway...

"Oh, right, so my father is being honored with some medal for some heroic actions in service - he was in the navy, before he... Yeah, but I wanted to know if maybe you would come to the ceremony? And if I could possibly borrow some of your clothes because I don't actually have any nice suits to wear and I don't want to make Gibbs spend money, 'cause money's a little tight right now, but my dad's a little, you know... tough about stuff like that, so...

"So I guess I'm gonna hang up now. Um. Please just. Just text me when you get this, don't call, because obviously I'm not- I'm not so good at this, this, talking thing. So. Yeah. Bye."

There's like twenty seconds of silence, and then a muffled "Oh" and then McGee hangs up.

Tony almost sends a somewhat spiteful text with the precise count of how many times McStutter says "Uh" in the length of the message, but reconsiders and sends a sincere, albeit awkward, congratulations instead.

It's a good move, because McGee's reply is practically dripping with relieved, apologetic smiley faces, and Tony's actually a little surprised by how anxious the younger boy seems.

He thinks about adding some further reassurance of some kind, perhaps asking if the kid wants to talk, but he doesn't.

He has no confidence in his own abilities to bolster self-esteem.

Instead, he enlists Ziva to snoop around McGee's closet, then sends the measurements she takes to one of his father's personal tailors along with a sizeable check.

Tony may not trust himself to help Tim, but he's pretty sure Giorgio Armani can't hurt matters any.

* * *

Tony's still pulling on his t-shirt as he shoulders open the locker room door after practice that day, only too happy to get away from the heated, smelly room and the thoughts that are crowding his head.

He's pretty sure Danny's taking 'roids, and he's pretty sure Danny's up for a hefty scholarship from some bigwig school out west, and he's pretty sure he knows what the right thing to do is, and he's pretty sure he's gonna screw things up either way. He's not sure what he's going to do.

He's distracted. He almost walks right into the coach, who's talking and laughing and grinning wide, though not nearly widely and charmingly enough to challenge Senior.

Senior, who's standing there. Senior, who's at the high school making small talk with Tony's coach.

Tony collects himself, straightens his shirts, and plasters on the widest smile of them all. "Hey, Dad," he says, grinning. "Why are you here?"

Here, as opposed to _anywhere else_, oh god...

"I came to watch you play," says Senior. "I must say, I was pretty impressed, Junior. I was just telling Coach Richards here, you could probably make something great of yourself, if you would ever just apply yourself. Why, he was just telling me that that Danny kid you hang around with sometimes, he's likely got a full ride coming his way-"

Tony winces, but keeps his mouth shut.

"I wouldn't abandon hope yet," says Coach Richards, grinning and digging an elbow into Tony's side. "From what I've heard, Danny's not the only one who's caught the scouts' attention."

Senior doesn't quite succeed at hiding his surprise.

"Dad, I've got some homework," Tony begins, "and my car's here. If you don't mind, I'll meet you at home. See you Monday, Coach."

Senior lets him go with a nod and an awkward attempt at a shoulder-clasp. Tony puts his head down and walks a little faster.

* * *

"I'm having an identity crisis, and it is your fault," says Ziva without preamble, sliding into the passenger seat of his car.

"Most things are, these days," Tony agrees. He yelps when Ziva swats at his arm, even though it doesn't hurt a bit. "Ow!"

"You have some substantial guilt issues," Ziva informs him, "and I was joking. I am the one who is to blame, I suppose, for not pondering any of this until now."

"Pondering what?" Tony asks, skirting around her first comment.

"What I am planning on doing with my life."

Tony groans. "Can we talk about something else, please? This is literally all I've been hearing, from my teachers and my coach and now my _dad_ wants to take an interest in my life for some reason-"

Ziva agreeably turns on the radio and asks if they can stop at CVS on the way home, so she can buy the hair dye that Abby has been harassing her about.

He immediately feels kind of bad about it.

* * *

That night, as Senior and a man in a suit with a briefcase laugh drunkenly downstairs, Tony sits with his back to the headboard on his unmade bed, fully-clothed, and plays with his cell phone to avoid meeting Arch'bald's liquid-black button eyes.

Eventually, the silence is too much, and he calls Ziva. She answers with a sleepy greeting before he can regret his actions and hang up.

"Want to come over and you can tell me about your identity crisis and I can listen and not making everything all about me for once?" he blurts out.

She laughs. "Tony, that is not necessary-"

"It kind of is, though," he says quietly, "'cause I was thinking about earlier, and now I feel like a jerk, and so now I guess I'm still being kind of selfish 'cause I want to ease my conscience, but also I would like to know what's going on in your life, because you're a really big part of mine... My life, that is."

There is a pause. "You may have just surpassed McGee in terms of incoherency over the telephone," Ziva laughs. "I will be right over."

* * *

For a while, they don't talk about it. Instead, they creep downstairs - tiptoeing redundantly, as if anyone could hear them over Senior and The Suit's roars of intoxicated laughter - and Tony trips over the coffee table in the darkened living room and Ziva's attempts at smothering her laughter dissolve into these bizarre, hiccoughy little squeaks that make them laugh all the harder.

Eventually, Tony blindly selects a DVD from his massive collection and slides it into the machine, to mask their conversation and provide a distraction if things get too heavy, and then sits back on his heels with a numbly pained little, "Oh," as the title screen to _Titanic_ begins to play.

"Figures," he mutters, and turns to Ziva. "I can change it if-"

"It is fine," she says firmly. "It is just a silly movie. And Leonardo DiCaprio is very handsome."

He moves to sit next to her on the couch, and pretends it's because he can't see where she is that he sits as close as he does. They watch for a long while in silence.

"I hate this movie," says Ziva abruptly, vehemently. "I hate it. And I do not understand why Americans romanticize the sinking of a boat as much as they do."

"A lot of people died," Tony offers.

"People die every day," dismisses Ziva, "in all sorts of circumstances, and they are good people and they are bad people, but they are not remembered."

Tony thinks of Jenny sobbing into Gibbs' shoulders as he smirked down at her, while he and Ziva crouched behind the couch, so still that his feet both fell asleep spectacularly.

"Do you want me to turn it off?"

"No," sighs Ziva after a moment, putting her head on his shoulder. "Jack is too handsome for that."

Tony wants to let it go and just embrace the warmth of her head on his shoulder, but finds that he can't, in good conscience.

"Maybe the whole world doesn't always remember," he says hesitantly, "but people aren't just forgotten. The people they loved probably remember. Like, my mom-"

But, no, that's a terrible example, because he doesn't remember her. And Senior's memories are tearing the man apart from within.

And he can't mention Jenny. Not while they're watching this.

"I mean," he says, "do you remember your-"

He winces.

"I mean-"

He doesn't know anything about Ziva's background, which honestly just shows what a crap friend he is, and he really shouldn't-

Ziva pats him on the chest sleepily, and then she kind of just leaves her hand there. A tingling warmth radiates from that point outward.

"It is alright," she tells him calmly. "And you are right, of course. You are much smarter than you give yourself credit for, Tony."

His mouth quirks lopsidedly. "Yeah, well... Tell that to my guidance counselor. She's pretty much resigned herself to prepping me for a job in the burger-flipping business."

"You will find something," Ziva says confidently, "that makes you happy, and then you will be successful. You just have to look for it."

"And you?"

She sighs. "I suppose I would be acting hypocritically if I did not say the same sentiment applied to me."

"You don't think it does?" he asks.

Ziva purses her lips, thinking. "I was not raised in a manner," she says slowly, "that gave much reason to search for other lines of work."

Tony tries to picture Ziva in military fatigues, and finds the image both alarmingly sexy and disturbing, because that Ziva is different from the one whose cheek rests on his shoulder. That Ziva's face is sharper and her eyes are harder and there is a gun on her shoulder and a ticking bomb counting down her days, promising that this one will die young.

"But that was a long time ago," he says, maybe just reassuring himself.

"Yes," she concedes, "but it is a difficult mentality to shake. I was not even aware it was still a part of me until you asked me what my plans for the future were, and I realized I had none. I do not believe it was ever a part of my father's plans for me to live a long life."

Tony is speechless. "What kind of monster-"

She shrugs. "A bureaucrat."

"But he doesn't own you anymore," he says fiercely. "_You_ get to decide what you want now. You get to pick what makes you happy."

"Yes," Ziva agrees, "it is my burden now."

"It's not supposed to be a burden," he says, surprised.

"I did not mean it like that," she explains apologetically. "It is just... It was easier before."

"It always is," he sighs, and finds there is not really anything more to say.

* * *

McGee's father looks nothing like him. His face is hard and his back is straight, and he inspires fear despite the canella in his nose and the bloodless bags beneath his unforgiving eyes.

McGee stands next to him. His lanky form, encased flawlessly in the finest charcoal Armani suit, towers over his father. And yet he is dwarfed by the erect, prematurely-aged man in the wheelchair.

The ceremony is long and filled with speeches proclaiming Admiral McGee's valor and bravery, all skirting around the current pitiful, wheelchair-ridden state of their honoree.

The admiral insists on standing to receive the medal, and Tony cringes in a kind of second-hand embarrassment.

Perhaps the elder McGee means it to be a victorious sight, but instead it is gruesome; a skeleton swimming in a dress uniform it once filled with muscle, shaking on fragile legs and wheezing, even as the admiral's hard eyes and chin are set in pained determination, loathing the weakness it has become.

Tim stands at his father's side, eyes wide and agonized in his round, childish face. He tries to take the man's arm, to ease the struggle of standing, but is shaken off vigorously. He shrinks away and into himself.

Afterwards, there is food and champagne, but Tony ignores it in favor of seeking out the McGees, father and son. He wants to quickly introduce himself to the Admiral, perhaps crack a few jokes to put some sincerity behind the fixed smile on McGee's face, and then get the hell out of here before he bumps into Gibbs.

He eventually locates them in a secluded hallway outside the banquet hall, but it seems an icy-eyed Gibbs has beaten him to it, exchanging clipped words with the stiff-jawed Admiral as Abby, looking as respectably arrayed in a neat black dress as any teenage girl in pigtails and a dog collar could, comforts a clearly shaken Tim a couple yards away.

The pigtailed girl looks up and, for once, does not scowl when she meets Tony's eyes. Instead, she widens them pointedly at him and then turns back to McGee, murmuring soothingly:

"Look, see, it's Tony. Even _he_ stopped being a dirtbag long enough to come and see you. I bet he's jealous of your suit."

"I gave him that suit," asserts Tony, and hesitantly draws nearer. "Looking sharp in your suit and tie, McTimberlake. So far you haven't put good old Giorgio to shame."

_"-my son, disappointing though he may be-"_

Abby's hands tighten on the boy's charcoal suit jacket as Tim smiles half-heartedly, almost a cringe. "Don't think you're getting away with giving this to me. I'm going to find some way to pay you back," he promises.

"-_don't deserve to call that boy your son-"_

"Please, that old thing? You can keep it," scoffs Tony carelessly. "I've had it lying around for years."

_"-you're the one who let him grow up weak-"_

"In my exact height and size?" Tim retorts.

Before Tony can answer, Gibbs says very coldly, looking down at the mean-eyed man in the wheelchair before him, "I think you're confusing your son with yourself, Admiral."

And with that he turns and walks away, putting a fatherly hand on McGee's shoulder as they go. Tony trails just behind and _aches_, because he remembers what that warm, comforting weight felt like.

Once they reach the foyer of the hall, Gibbs nods to Abby and says, "I'll meet you in the car, just gonna grab a doggy bag."

Abby leads a numb-looking McGee out with some soothing words and an awkward half-smile over her shoulder at Tony just before the door closes behind her.

And then Gibbs turns to look at Tony.

"How you been, DiNozzo?"

His insides shriveled and icy, Tony whips out the trademark DiNozzo grin and shrugs. "Can't complain."

The light blue eyes analyze his face briefly like an X-ray. "College?"

Tony moves one shoulder restlessly. "Probably."

Gibbs nods. "Good."

And then they both pause.

"Well, it was nice seeing you," says Tony - a lie - and then he gets out of there while he still can, lest the words, the questions he really wants to ask - why don't you want me anymore - break free.

* * *

"You're a good kid," says Senior, weighing heavy on Tony's shoulder as together they make a teetery, weaving trip from the study to the nearest couch.

He leans over and vomits before Tony can come up with a reply.

* * *

Wendy asks if he wants to try things again, but Tony says no, thank you, and is not even a little bit sad about it.

He's been feeling a little less lonely these days - not so much that he has more company, but that he craves that company less - and he actually likes Wendy quite a bit as a person, enough to know she won't ever be happy with someone who doesn't have all the answers. He, meanwhile, doesn't even know what he's questioning.

Wendy shrugs and says, fine, that's okay, see you around? And he says he hopes so, and means it.

* * *

He comes home from basketball practice to a house that smells of sick.

Tony just shrugs off his backpack and takes the stairs in twos, locking himself away for a night of procrastination that promises high stress and low productivity.

It's almost midnight when he gets a bizarre and fierce craving for peanut butter, and it's only once he's in the kitchen with a spoon in the peanut butter jar and a quart of milk to his lips that he sees his father.

He chokes, and the milk spills all down his front, and his stomach turns queasily because it is not a pretty sight.

There's a lot of vomit and there's some blood and Senior's favorite glass tumbler is in shards on the hardwood floor, and facedown in the midst of it all is a lump in a designer suit.

After the initial shock fades, he's really not terribly surprised, and that part is perhaps more horrifying than even the scene before him.

* * *

Sitting in the muted waiting room at the ER, Tony sees in an article in a week-old newspaper he's perusing to avoid meeting anyone's eyes that La Grenouille was killed last week.

They call him Renee Benoit, of course, and say he died under mysterious circumstances abroad, which are still being investigated by the government, and that he was a philanthropist and an art enthusiast and that he leaves behind a loving daughter and a grieving community.

So after that Tony reads an IKEA catalogue instead.

* * *

Gibbs shows up half an hour later with coffee.

Tony never figures out how the man caught wind of the situation. He doesn't ask; he doesn't talk at all.

He sips his coffee - too bitter because Gibbs objects to sugar - and waits.

Gibbs sits beside him and he waits, too, in silence.

* * *

Senior's sitting up when Tony's finally allowed to see him again, leering flirtatiously at the blushing young nurse who's doing something to one of the many tubes sticking out of him.

He grins sheepishly. "Hey, Junior."

Tony waits for an apology.

Senior turns back to the nurse, "All I'm saying, angel, is that a shot of the good stuff'd take the edge off things better than any pain medication. Just some hard stuff. For medicinal purposes, of course." And he winks.

Tony sits down in the uncomfortable plastic chair, fingers knotted together until his knuckles are white and his fingertips are purple.

He's so mad he can't speak, so instead he lets Senior wink at the nurse and rattle on about how it was just some indigestion, how he can hold his liquor and how the doctors are damn fools if they think a little booze once in a while's gonna put a dent in the DiNozzo kidneys, because apparently that's a hereditary thing so bonus for Tony, and then the nurse says Tony has to go home, so he does.

Gibbs is in the waiting room, silent. He follows Tony out into the dim parking lot, silent, and then taps him once on the elbow and leads him to a familiar car where he and Tim used to squabble over shotgun.

Tony says nothing when the car stops in the driveway of the purple house, just kicks off his sneakers at the front door because the rule has always been _no shoes indoors_.

The house is quiet, the green digits of the cable box blinking a solemn 3:20. The bunk above McGee's is empty when Gibbs wordlessly sends him on his way. He sprawls across the coverlet, socked feet sticking through the slats at the foot of the bed, because apparently he's grown or something, and waits for sleep to come.

Ziva comes instead, silently ascending the ladder and sliding her cold feet under his legs as she huddles against the footboard.

Neither says anything, but she squeezes his ankle with her thin fingers every time his breath hitches, and to that odd rhythm he falls asleep.

* * *

Abby has made him chocolate chip pancakes when he wakes up at half-past one that afternoon. She heaps with whipped cream and happy-colored sprinkles and refuses to meet his eyes across the table when he offers a rusty thank you.

* * *

They let Senior out of the hospital three days later with a strict warning and an appointment with a liver specialist.

Gibbs is waiting at the front door of the house. He and Senior go into the office. There is no boisterous laughter or clinking glasses or toasting. Senior's face is flushed red when the front door closes quietly behind the lean, silver-haired man.

Tony retreats, because his father looks remorseful, and he doesn't want that anymore. He doesn't know what he wants.

Except-

Except there is a letter, amidst the sheaf of unopened envelopes in their mailbox - several of which are angry-looking bills - that is addressed to him from Ohio State University.

Tony's fingertips thrum with his pulse as he clumsily slits it open, and he thinks he might want this.

* * *

It's Senior's idea. He turns as Tony pulls his father's car into a space before the specialist's office, and says, "Why don't you stop by your mother's while I'm being seen, Junior?"

He closes the door before Tony answers, and the rosary beads on the dashboard jingle a little.

Tony waits until he's sure Senior's not watching him to pull out again.

* * *

The cemetery is quiet, but not silent. There are birds and sounds of the nearby highway. The thin early spring sun is an unobtrusive presence overhead.

Tony crouches a bit awkwardly before an expensive-looking headstone (Jenny's was a far cheaper affair) with the family name on the plaque and a cluster of sunshiny daffodils lying at its base.

It's quiet; he doesn't quite know what to say, because right now he doesn't really have any answers to give or even any questions to ask. He needs someone to tell him what to do.

His mother offers nothing, of course, dead fourteen years. There is a little peace, though, and he relishes that.

Finally his calves begin to cramp so he gets to his feet and picks his way back through the graves and the clumps of flowers and tokens that adorn them, and the flash of the silver spikes of a dog collar suddenly catches his eye.

And there is Abby, a comical sight in her schoolgirl-porno skirt and pigtails, pale arms wrapped around heaps of flowers and a lacey black parasol tucked haphazardly between her elbow and her hip.

Tony, occasionally a gentleman, takes the parasol for her and courteously holds it above her pigtailed head.

She looks surprised, then apprehensive, then hesitant. And then there is a tentative smile. "Thanks," she says, nothing more.

"Visiting someone?" says Tony, hurrying his pace; he'd forgotten what a workout it was to keep up with Abby's long, energetic strides.

Abby looks confused, then looks down at the mound of blossoms overflowing from her arms, and smiles again.

"Well, not _someone_ so much as _everyone_," she says ruefully. "I like to stand in and keep the graves looking pretty when there aren't loved ones around to do it themselves."

This is a typical Abby sentiment. It makes Tony almost sad even as he wonders at her goodness.

"That's nice of you," he offers lamely.

She shrugs, and a few riotously-colored petals cascade in her wake. "It makes me sad when people forget other people."

Tony says, "You did the ones at my mom's grave, then? The daffa-whatsits?"

"Daffodils," she corrects, and pauses momentarily to shift all the blossoms into a precarious one-armed grip. She roots around with her freed hand and retrieves a yellow flower, which she hands to him. "Were they your mom's favorite?"

He frowns. "I don't know."

Abby shrugs and begins to walk once more. "I just assumed, 'cause your dad always brings daffodils when he comes, so-"

Tony follows, twirling the crisp green stem beneath his forefinger and his thumb.

"He does?"

She nods. "We run into each other sometimes, but I don't think he really remembers me." She looks at him without turning her face to him, green eyes under mascara-d lashes. "You didn't know?"

He shrugs and the parasol. "We don't really talk."

"It's a shame when stuff like that happens," says Abby casually.

Tony stops short. Abby continues on for a second, then whirls and hops back beneath the sheltering shade of the parasol.

"Abby, I'm sorry-"

She looks down at her armful of flowers, and carefully picks free a few more sunshine-yellow daffodils. "Here, why don't you go give those to your mom? I'll finish up here and meet you at the car. We can get ice cream and start talking again."

He smiles. "Sounds good."

She smiles back, and the sun is a little more yellow in the sky.

* * *

"We could start a detective agency," says Tony.

Ziva throws popcorn at him.

"Lots of college kids don't know what they want to do before they graduate," says Tony seriously. He wants to take her hand, but doesn't. "I don't know what I want either, most of the time, and you're only a junior so you've still got time. And you're good at everything, so... "

"Hmm," says Ziva, with her brow furrowed like she's thinking. She looks up abruptly, "Speaking of college, were you planning on telling me about Ohio State or simply anticipating that McGee would hack the database?"

"What-"

She grins at him, brow smooth and worry gone. "You are accepted, yes?"

"Yes," he agrees, and he can't help but grin, too.

"Hmm," she says. "Maybe we will cross paths."

He grins wider. "You think?"

Ziva shrugs. "Stranger things have happened."

He wants to kiss her, but instead he grabs her hands and twirls her around the living room until she bangs her shin on a table and starts cursing in Yiddish or something.

It's a rush of adrenaline and air and anticipation, and for a second he's not standing still.

It's a good day.

* * *

There are good days:

He goes back to the cemetery with Abby and they dedicate an afternoon to making the oldest, most neglected of graves the most beautiful.

He plays video games and watches action movies with Tim, and they talk about girls and cars and not feelings, because they're _men_.

He takes Ziva to his senior prom and leers so she can't tell that he thinks he might be in love with her, and afterwards they rent a hotel room and watch _Law and Order SVU_ and _Suite Life On Deck_ and call room service for champagne and cheese fries at three in the morning.

They spend the next week calling each other suggestive names like 'sweetcheeks' in an attempt to encourage McGee's thriving suspicions that they slept together.

The day he tells Senior about OSU, his old man beams and brags and offers to take him out to dinner, but instead Tony makes chocolate chip pancakes and they eat in companionable quiet.

Those are the good days.

There are bad days, too, of course, the days when Tony puts intentional barbs in his words, because he has power when he belittles Tim. He and Abby go to Jenny's grave and Abby cries and gets angry when he can't make himself vocalize his emotions, and he ends up driving away in a rage.

He asks Ziva about the past and she ices him. She spins speculations about the future until he feels motion sick. He sits next to her on the couch sometimes and agonizes over whether or not to take her hand.

Senior gets drunk a couple times. It's uncomfortable when he's apologetic and hung-over the next morning, but it's worse when he laughs as Tony yells accusations at him like he is the father and Senior the petulant child.

Still, there are not so many drunken nights, and Tony's beginning to understand that life is painful in its good and wildly sweet in its bad, and that to avoid one is to avoid the other, but to shrink back from both is to be paralyzed. So he keeps going.

* * *

The night before Tony turns eighteen, he pulls his car into the heavily-chalked driveway of the house with the wrap-around porch and the big, leafy rhododendron and the soccer goal right in the front yard.

Everything smells of ozone from the morning's sun shower and of heaven itself because Gibbs is barbecuing, but in the basement it smells only of sawdust and stale bourbon.

Gibbs doesn't look up as Tony slowly descends the stairs, busily sweeping loose sawdust from the floor in the same easy, definitive motions that he sanded his boat.

"I finally figured it out," says Tony.

"Did you now?"

"Well," he falters, "nah, Ziva had to explain it to me and she was really metaphorical and girly about it, so. No, I didn't really figure it out exactly because I'm still lost. But I think it's gonna be okay."

"So what're you doin' here?"

"You invited me over, remember?" Tony deflects.

"What are you doing _down here_?" Gibbs stresses.

Tony hesitates, leaning against the railing and breathing in must and sawdust. "I guess I just need you to tell me... that it _is_ gonna be okay."

"Don't need to," says Gibbs shortly, and keeps sweeping.

Some of the tightness between Tony's shoulder blades lessens. "Okay. I just- okay."

Gibbs looks up at last, leaning against the broom and crooking an eyebrow dryly. "Anything else I can do for you, DiNozzo?"

"How'd you get the boat out of the basement?"

The man laughed a little, and leaned the broom against the wall. "Gather the troops. It's time to go."

"Throw me a bone, at least! Does one of the walls come loose, or-"

* * *

They drive with the windows down and the night air pouring in, all crammed together so that Ziva's leg is pressed to his - and so is Tim's on Tony's opposite side, but that doesn't have quite the same effect.

It's late, nearly midnight, and Abby can't decide whether or not she wants to listen to a Screamo cd or a _Stuart Little_ book-on-tape, so they alternate between chapters and songs, and Gibbs just smirks when they all complain.

Behind them is the trailer, and on that, covered with a tarpaulin, is the boat, a discernable lump in the dark.

The ocean is gray and dappled with crisp white foam from the day's storms, choppy with little waves as the big, noisy fishing boat they've borrowed from Mr. Franks-who-sounds-like-a-cowboy skims across the water's surface.

It's breezy and cold and the wind carries ocean spray in its every gust, whipping Ziva's hair into a raucously-curling halo and making McGee mutter about pneumonia. Gibbs is quiet at the dash.

Once they've sufficiently distanced themselves from the shore, Gibbs kills the motor and they sit in an eerie, rocking silence of lapping water and McGee sniffling pitifully for a length of time that might have stretched a minute or a millennium.

Something suddenly must signal to Gibbs that the time is at hand, because he gets to his feet and nods at Tony as he moves to the smaller, tarpaulin-wrapped bulk at the ship's stern.

It takes the combined efforts of Gibbs, Tony, Ziva, and Abby to heave the wooden structure overboard while McGee clears his throat and shakes his head woefully like he is already certain that he has contracted some form of influenza, possibly a pneumatic plague.

The small wooden boat bobs in the choppy water alongside the large fishing vessel, but does not sink. Of course it doesn't; after all, Gibbs made it, and Gibbs does not err. Ever.

They wait some more. And then all at once there is a crack of brilliance on the white-tipped horizon, and even McGee gets dismally to his feet to watch its progression.

Gibbs says lowly, "Go," and they all lean forward and shove the small wooden boat out and away.

The Jenny bobs and dips, but it does not sink, and as they watch it slowly dance away, rising and falling over the crests of the waves that set their larger vessel rocking like a lullaby, Ziva's hand fumbles around and secures Tony's own.

They all stand together, backs to the rising sun, and watch in quiet as The Jenny gets smaller and smaller in the darkness, a pinpoint that dwindles away and is suddenly gone.

Tony's gut registers something like shock, but Gibbs just claps his hands together in weary satisfaction and starts the engine. McGee begins a quest for lozenges, but stills his rummaging like a frightened animal when Abby sighs contentedly and settles her sharp little chin on his shoulder.

The sun bursts forth in earnest as the boat skips back over the waves to the shore, and Ziva gives Tony a squinty-eyed grin as they turn, hands clasped, to face it head-on.

It lights the low-lying, gray rainclouds a shade that can only be described as purple.

"Happy?" inquires Ziva, shouting over the roar of the engine and the waves, squinting in the sun.

Tony can't find the words.

* * *

**I hope it turned out okay. **

**I'm sort of numb that I've finally come to the end of this monster, so bear with me as I write you a small novel of an author's note. **

**Firstly, I'd like to apologize for all the delays that have accompanied each of my updates, not only on this story, but everything. Real life happens and stuff, you know, but mostly I've just been struggling with some hefty writer's block and consequent self-esteem issues regarding my writing and the direction I want to take it in. I'm working on it. I'm not giving up, but it's taking time.  
**

**Next I'd like to thank anybody who's still reading, because I know I don't deserve you wonderful people. Thank you for your patience, which I'm sure I've tested!**

**And to everybody that's left me encouraging reviews and PMs, I love you. I haven't exactly been faithful with my replies. (Who am I kidding, I haven't replied to like anything in months.) However, I have read and smiled over every one, and they mean SO much to me as I flounder around with my words and nibble anxiously at my cuticles.  
**

**So I guess that's it. I hope you've enjoyed. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and if you wouldn't mind, drop me a few lines on your way out to let me know if you think I've ended this catastrophe on a semi-successful note, whether you've been reading all along or have just stumbled your way in. (In which case, hello, I'm a flake). **

**And I guess that's it. Thanks, everyone. Hopefully I'll see you around :)**

**Less than three, Styx  
**


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